This huge cliche of a movie isn't even a distant relation of films like The Color of Money, which can actually make you root for hustlers. The Big Town only proves we've gone back to the 1950's one time too many.

Mr. Ivory and Ismail Merchant have long since learned to breathe life into their material without excessive reverence, in a manner that is as decorous as it is dramatic. As might be expected, the costumes, settings and cinematography are once again ravishing.

Mr. Lyne takes a brilliantly manipulative approach to what might have been a humdrum subject and shapes a soap opera of exceptional power.

Mr. Barker is no more successful in making the big leap from literature to film than Norman Mailer. He's cast his film with singularly uninteresting actors, though the special effects aren't bad - only damp.

The film roams from the Upper West Side to Coney Island to Atlantic City, maintaining a lighthearted style that doesn't quite match the hints of obsessiveness in Mr. Toback's screenplay.

An anarchic, often hilarious adventure in dial-spinning, a collection of brief skits and wacko parodies that are sometimes quite clever, though they're just as often happily sophomoric, too.

Frank Deese's script is as rudimentary as the lyrics that pound through the hallways, and Christopher Cain's direction provides no surprises.

A coolly efficient thriller with an octopus of a plot.

Two actors who do have good material, and make the most of it, are Courtney Vance, as the platoon's snappish, highly articulate medic, and Dylan McDermott, as the platoon's exhausted sergeant. Mr. Vance is particularly fine. The narrative picks up weight and momentum every time he comes on the screen. Also good is Tegan West, who plays yet another young, raw lieutenant who must depend on the patience of his men.

There's not a weak performance in the film, but I especially admired the work of Mr. Cooper, Mr. Tighe, Miss McDonnell, Miss Mette, Mr. Gunton, Mr. Strathairn and Mr. Mostel. They may be playing Social-Realist icons, but each manages to make something personal and idiosyncratic out of the material, without destroying the ballad-like style.

It means to be funny, with a cast including several talented young comedians (among them Bill Maher, as a record business exectuvie), but it's not.

Jean de Florette has the delicacy or something freshly observed. It's so good that one needn't be ashamed of escaping into its idealized if harsh and rocky world.

The dancing itself, especially the dirty dancing, choreographed by Kenny Ortega, looks very contemporary, or, at least, as contemporary as "Saturday Night Fever," but it has a drive and a pulse that give the filim real excitement. [21 Aug 1987, p.C3]

Gross-out humor for children, cynically packaged with goody-goody morals that wouldn't convince the most naive parent or child.

The screenplay, by Daniel Petrie Jr. and Jack Baran, has a number of funny lines and situations, but the end result looks fiddled with by people attempting to ''fix'' things.

Enormously good-natured - exactly the wrong tone for a comedy that needs all the rambunctious lunacy it can get. Instead, this story of an American mistakenly deported to Mexico as an illegal alien is amiable and plodding, the very last things you'd expect from Cheech, with or without Chong.

No Way Out has the exuberance of something freshly conceived. It's so effective, in fact, that when it's all over, you might want to sit through the beginning again just to see if the end is justified by the means. I suspect that it is.

Can't Buy Me Love has an identity crisis that's a mirror-image of Ronald's own. He thinks he wants popularity at any price, though he's really a sincere guy. The film thinks it wants to be sincere, when all it truly wants is to be popular, just like the other kids' movies, so it sells off its originality.

A silly attempt to crossbreed an Our Gang comedy with a classic horror film, which usually means that both genres have reached the end of the line.

A denouement as clunky as the title.

The surfing footage is fairly routine until the film's climax, a contest featuring some spectacular shots of surfers seen beneath the overhang of breaking waves. Otherwise, the surfing, writing, direction and performances are of a caliber to interest only undiscriminating adolescents.

If you liked the toy, you'll love the movie.

Back to the Beach opened yesterday. But if you catch a television commercial for it, or the rock video that's on television, you'll get the joke and see the most this movie has to offer.

Madonna, left to her own devices and her own canny pace, is a very engaging comedian, and the screenplay, by Andrew Smith and Ken Finkleman, contains a lot of raffishly funny ideas that get lost in the busyness of the physical production.

What's the differences between the Care Bears television show on Saturday morning and The Care Bears' Adventure in Wonderland...? The movie is longer, and you will have to pay money to see it - about as much as it appears the producers spent to make it.

Delivers excitement, humor and good nature. The director uses the conventions of the action-comedy in so adroit a way that you may even forget the hundred other films you've seen lately about a couple of cops kidding around with each other in between battling the bad guys.

The Lost Boys is to horror movies what ''Late Night With David Letterman'' is to television; it laughs at the form it embraces, adds a rock-and-roll soundtrack and, if you share its serious-satiric attitude, manages to be very funny.

Mr. Dalton, the latest successor to the role of James Bond, is well equipped for his new responsibilities.

Threadbare as it's beginning to look, the Superman series hasn't lost its raison d'etre. There's life in the old boy yet.

A film like this is quite naturally a showcase for its star, and as Valens, Lou Diamond Phillips has a sweetness and sincerity that in no way diminish the toughness of his onstage persona.

The film's only bright idea is a duo named Chain Saw (Cameron) and Dave (Riley), who love horror films and instigate grisly but imaginative practical jokes, like pretending to be attacked by bunnies when the class makes a field trip to a petting zoo.

Paul Verhoeven, a Dutch director ("Soldier of Orange"), doesn't let the furiously futuristic plot get in the way of the flaming explosions, shattering glass and hurtling bodies.

Lorraine Gary has some affecting moments as Ellen, but Jaws the Revenge is mild and predictable, the very things an adventure movie should never be.

At least slightly more varied than the average fraternity-boy comedy.The nerds' rap number, in which they sing of nerd pride, is probably the high point of this whole endeavor.

To be fair, ''Adventures in Baby-Sitting'' is determinedly cute, and its pep may well be appreciated by anyone with a frame of reference as narrow as the film makers' own. It's clear from the film's opening moments that pep is all that matters here anyhow.

Surf Nazis Must Die isn't funny in the slightest, the title notwithstanding. It's a standard, thoroughly stupid gang-war exploitation film intercut with occasional low-energy surfing footage, featuring characters named Adolf, Eva and so on who chant slogans, wear swastikas on their wetsuits and burn surfboards from time to time. Not even the actors' relatives will find this interesting.

It takes great confidence to think of a second film before the first is even finished; either that, or it takes great nerve. In any case, Innerspace, which opens today at the Criterion and other theaters, has all the brashness of a hit, if not all the luster.

No one who sees Full Metal Jacket will easily put the film's last glimpse of D'Onofrio, or a great many other things about Kubrick's latest and most sobering vision, out of mind.

Mr. Aykroyd and Mr. Hanks play well together, but the funniest performance in the film is that of Dabney Coleman, as the smut king (who lisps). Somewhat less diverting are the car chases and the time out necessary to explain the throwaway story.

Mr. Brooks's vision of ''Star Wars'' and its underlying silliness cannot help but wear thin. But Spaceballs has none of the aggressively unfunny humor that has marred some of Mr. Brooks's other recent efforts, and its spirits remain consistently high.

Bracing...Withnail and I isn't social history. It's about growing up, almost as if by accident. It's also genuinely funny.

A thoroughly pleasant, down-to-earth romantic comedy that never entirely takes flight, though it picks up immeasurably whenever Mr. Martin is on screen.

Alternately grisly and dull, with few surprises.

The Witches of Eastwick does have enough flamboyance to hold the attention, directed as it has been by Mr. Miller in a bright, flashy, exclamatory style. But beneath the surface charm there is too much confusion, and the charm itself is gone long before the film is over.

An absurd, especially cheerless movie about child-sacrificing devil-worshippers who've slipped out of Africa and, via East Harlem, have come down into midtown Manhattan to infiltrate the ranks of the white establishment. In addition to everything else that's wrong, The Believers is more than a little bit racist.

Attention must be paid when a movie is as aggressively awful as Harry and the Hendersons, though it's so pin-headed that it could be the last of its inbred line. It's not likely to spawn.

All things considered, Benji's ability to hold the viewer's interest is remarkable, as is his sweetness with the cubs and his fearlessness with larger, predatory types. Adults are likely to stay alert, and any child who has so much as petted a poodle will probably find the animal footage irresistible.

The Stepfather is too often disappointingly thin.

Hollywood's latest big-budget, high-concept, mass-market reworking of material not entirely fresh, has more endings than Beethoven's Fifth, but it's also packed with surprises, not the least being that it's a smashing work. It's vulgar, violent, funny and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful.

Mr. Itami often strains after comic effects that remain elusive. The most appealing thing about Tampopo is that he never stops trying. A funny sensibility is at work here.

There have been worse ideas for innocuous summer films, but not many worse executions. The slapstick is tame and predictable. The characters and their inspirational message are served up as neatly - there's no avoiding this - as if they were in commercials.

The new film has at least some of its predecessor's appeal. But it can't match the first film's novelty, or recapture the excitement of watching a great comic character like Axel Foley as he first came to life.

The worst of it is painless; the best is funny, sly, cheerful and, here and there, even genuinely inspired.

Mr. Hunter has an extraordinarily clear understanding of teen-age characters, especially those who must find their own paths without much parental supervision. Though its Midwestern locale and lower socioeconomic stratum give it a different setting, River's Edge shares something with Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, a novel that is also full of directionless, drug-taking teen-age characters who are without moral moorings and left entirely to their own devices. This is as chilling to witness as it is difficult to dramatize, if only because at their centers these lives are already so empty.

The film covers the main events of the Orton life in a manner that is nothing less than distracted. One has little understanding of the fatal intensity - and need - that kept Orton and Halliwell together.

Hot Pursuit is just what you'd expect from such a stale formula: a misadventure in paradise that makes ''Gilligan's Island'' look like ''The Night of the Iguana.''

Though a seriously conceived film about the American experience in Vietnam, Gardens of Stone has somehow wound up having the consistency and the kick of melted vanilla ice cream.

The episodes are marginally interesting, but each is a little too long. And each could be fully explained in a one-sentence synopsis.

The trouble with My Life as a Dog is that too often it imposes an alien sensibility upon the boy, requiring that he behave in a way that adults can too easily identify as charming. My Life as a Dog is a movie with a split point of view.

It has a bold, bright look and a crisp tempo, propelling the action from one shootout to another until it finally reaches the most violent of its crescendos. By the time it has arrived at this last stage, the film is so close to being ludicrous that it's hard to know whether it is deteriorating or ascending.

a young folks' story, a sweet-natured boy-and-his-chimp tale (even the bad guys aren't all that bad), with a dose of Animal Liberation to give the impression that something of current signficance is going on.

When eventually, as it must, the story makes its demands on the characters, things slow down considerably. However, The Secret of My Success still leaves you with a good feeling about the idiocies of Big Business.

The director, B. W. L. Norton, and the writers, Richard Martini, Tim Metcalfe and Miguel Tejada-Flores, display no idea whatsoever of how to keep a film moving or how to hold an audience's interest. Listlessness and sloppiness on this scale are truly depressing.

The Police Academy series seems to shoot for an ever younger crowd. The optimum viewer for Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol would be a 10-year-old boy. Even better, it would be a whole pack of them. That's not to say the film isn't funny; it means only that the sense of humor being addressed is very specific. Stay away if drawing room farce is what you're after.

Blind Date is farce of a traditional and even old-fashioned sort, but Mr. Edwards's complete enthusiasm for the form creates a comic style so avid that it's slightly surreal. Comic possibilities are everywhere in Blind Date, and the tireless Mr. Edwards leaves none of them unexploited.

An earnest but clumsy tribute to the heroism of the American servicemen - mostly officers - who were captured and held prisoner by North Vietnam during the long, desperate undeclared war we now refer to simply as Vietnam.

An exuberant satire, uneven but tirelessly energetic, with the kind of comic bluster that can override any lapse. It's funny, ragged, appealingly mean-spirited and very easy to like, even if it plays as a series of skits rather than a coherent whole.

An engrossing study of loose talk, weakness and seduction, played out in both the world of high-powered journalism and the seediest corners of Times Square.

Like "Blood Simple," it's full of technical expertise but has no life of its own... The direction is without decisive style. [11 Mar 1987, p.C24]

Its ideal audience would be full of Three Stooges fans with streaks for grotesque humor. [13 Mar 1987, p.C18]

Mr. Gray's feature-length monologue brings people, places and things so vibrantly to life that they're very nearly visible on the screen.

Barry Levinson's richly textured new film also has a rueful nostalgia, a fine-tuned streak of con artistry, and the same hilarious, nit-picking small talk that colored Diner, his first and best film - which is recalled, rivaled and in a few ways even outdone by this one.

The very best I can say is that Witchboard should encourage struggling film makers. Watch it and think, ''I can do better than that!''

The setting is Las Vegas, where Mex wins and loses a lot of money in blackjack without getting too excited about it, and things work up tepidly to the big battle in a factory handily stocked with murderous devices.

The film is all fast action, noisy stunts and huge, often unflattering close-ups, but it packs an undeniable wallop.

Mr. Parker is an eclectic film maker. He seems to have no readily identifiable obsessions that define supposedly more serious directors. He's a very able technician who needs a good screenplay, which is what's missing here.

It has a light touch, a disarming cast, a well-developed sense of humor and a lot of charm. [27 Feb 1987, p.C17]

Freddy Krueger is the most talkative of slashers, and also the most creative. In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, he displays a great debt to Dali in concocting surreal visions for his prey. When Freddy enters the dreams of his teen-age victims, ordinary objects become armed and dangerous.

Working Girls, though a work of fiction, sounds as authentic as might a documentary about coal miners. The camera attends to the duties of the ''girls'' without apparent emotional response.

In place of a real story, there is just the spectacle of stock characters being put through their paces to fill up the time.

One of Mr. Stallone's more muddled efforts but by no means a flop on the order of F.I.S.T. or Rhinestone.

As in Blue Collar and Hardcore, Mr. Schrader shows himself capable of launching the action in a powerhouse style. Once again, that forcefulness deteriorates as the film progresses.

Comes on with the seductiveness of an expensive perfume that inevitably evaporates before the night is over. However, though it promises more than it can ever deliver, this classy-looking melodrama is soothing, in the way that luxe can be, as well as redeemingly funny, in part, at least, for not becoming mired in its own darker possibilities.

The screenplay is inelegant but lively, and the direction gives the material a wicked edge.

As free in form as it is generous of spirit.

It works because Miss Midler and Miss Long are hilarious, both separately and together. Another thing that works is Leslie Dixon's screenplay, which has energy, wit and a supreme confidence that's just this side of bluster.

As adapted by Miss Henley and directed by Bruce Beresford, this Crimes of the Heart has been turned into a majestic, totally humorless star turn for three individually splendid, collectively lost actresses -Diane Keaton (Lenny), Jessica Lange (Meg) and Sissy Spacek (Babe).

The only thing The Bedroom Window seems to be about is movie making - that is, it's about putting pieces of film together to create momentary effects that needn't signify anything at all. Sometimes this is called ''pure cinema.'' Sometimes, in fact, it's pure nonsense.

The problem is that Wisdom is aggressively boring, either because one can predict everything that's going to happen and exactly how it will look on the screen or because the concept of the film eventually seems even more confused than the title character.

The background is energetic; too bad the foreground is just as chaotic...Mr. Lowenstein - whose work includes many rock videos and ''Strikebound,'' a film about Australian miners - prefers sensory overload to coherence.

Neil Simon is hardly Norman Rockwell, but his Brighton Beach Memoirs has a warmly nostalgic quality, something that has traveled very nicely to the screen...A film of surprisingly gentle charms. Mr. Simon's humor is much in evidence, but it is not the film's strongest selling point. Even more effective are the sense of a place and a way of life long vanished and the care and affection with which they have been summoned up.

Little Shop of Horrors isn't uniformly entertaining, nor is its score always entirely audible; the musical dubbing is at times very awkward. But its best moments are delightful enough to make the slow stretches unimportant.

Possibly the best work of any kind about the Vietnam War since Michael Herr's vigorous and hallucinatory book "Dispatches."

King Kong Lives, which was directed by John Guillerman, has a dull cast and a plot that's even duller, but the ape himself is in good form.

No Mercy is a passionate film noir that depends heavily upon Mr. Gere to give it credence, and Mr. Gere delivers.

After his triumphant Beverly Hills Cop, Eddie Murphy could have done anything. Why, then, did he choose to head for the mysterious Orient to make a film as rich in mumbo jumbo as The Golden Child? Mr. Murphy's comic skepticism in the face of all this is the film's greatest asset. But it is worn thin by the awareness that not even he seems able to take the adventure seriously, and by the preposterousness and inconsistency of what surrounds him.

The narrative unfolds in a series of short, sometimes enigmatic scenes that have the effect of a series of simple declarative sentences. They describe the action without ever interpreting it. After a while, one realizes that there really isn't an awful lot to interpret.

As the gritty, raspy-voiced sergeant, Mr. Eastwood's performance is one of the richest he's ever given. It's funny, laid-back, seemingly effortless, the sort that separates actors who are run-of-the-mill from those who have earned the right to be identified as stars.