The film moves along at a serviceable clip, but it seems half an hour too long, thanks to the obligatory shoot-'em-up conclusion, filmed on the largest sound-stage in the world, but nevertheless the dullest sequence here.

It is hard not to wonder how this movie might have turned out if Mr. Sorkin had decided his protagonist was as much a weasel as the one he wrote for “The Social Network,” another story of an American striver. It’s hard not to wonder, too, how this story might play if its protagonist wasn’t a woman who, as this movie sees it, needed so much male defending.

What holds this patchwork of naughtiness together is some pretty threadbare cloth.

Despite all the drama of the situation (United States threatened with biological destruction from outer space, etc.) nothing very exciting goes on in The Andromeda Strain. Since nobody greatly feels or acts, we are left with the drama of people tensely sitting around in chairs, twisting dials and watching TV monitors. From time to time, somebody gets up and paces the room.

It is no good at all, but fun, at moments, to watch.

It's not bad, as apes and 20th Century-Fox go, at least hand in hand.

Amnesia, Mr. Schroeder has said, is a story partly based on his mother, who refused to speak German, so perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s strongest when it focuses on Martha, a character Ms. Keller inhabits gracefully.

Night of the Living Dead is a grainy little movie acted by what appear to be nonprofessional actors, who are besieged in a farm house by some other nonprofessional actors who stagger around, stiff-legged, pretending to be flesh-eating ghouls.

Mr. Romero, who adapted the screenplay from Michael Stewart's novel, wraps up more loose ends than anyone cares about, yet leaves some nagging bits of illogic.

The trouble with the movie — and it’s significant — is that Mr. Saleh is so keen to survey Egypt’s dysfunction that his pacing wanes. It’s possible to admire each scene and still see this film, in its entirety, as in need of some serious sharpening.

The ballet dancer Misty Copeland, who makes a brief appearance during the film and in the closing credits, is the highlight, gracefully unhindered by silly dialogue in two dance sequences.

The story is not without interest, and it touches on a couple of worthwhile themes: cultural erasure and the way religious and provincial prejudices can suppress love. But its treatment of these subjects is perhaps undercut by its conventionality.

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.

Howard the Duck' begins as a mild satire about a duck who fell to earth, but midway through, the star is upstaged by horrifying demons and dazzling light shows.

Mr. Marshall does a much better job with the feistier early scenes than with this subsequent mush, so the film does have a good first hour. But by the end, the film goes on much longer than it should. The physical look of Overboard is also surprisingly dreary. Though the yacht scenes have some visual wit, particularly where Miss Hawn's outrageous costumes are concerned, John A. Alonzo's cinematography is conspicuously poor.

The overall vibe — a look that is both opulent and generic; a tone that mixes brisk professionalism with maundering self-pity; an aggressive, exhausting fusion of grandiosity and fun — is more superhero saga than espionage caper.

The movie is a pointed reminder that Ms. McAdams is one of cinema’s most accomplished and appealing comic actresses. It’s almost heartbreaking to contemplate how amazing she would be in a new comedy that was more than intermittently O.K.

With its bleak, yearning tone and defiantly cloudy color palette, “England Is Mine” has a pleasingly granular feel for its era and location. But its imagining of Morrissey as a self-pitying narcissist, a curiously passive intellectual who can’t get out of his own way, soaks the movie in a wearying inertia.

Its light classical manner and its happyish ending. Whatever Mr. Allen is doing in constructing this pretty, slight, gently entertaining movie, he isn't doing the thing he does best. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy gives the impression of someone speaking fluently but formally in a language not his own.

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.

Nestor Almendros's cinematography is soothingly gorgeous, and so are Miss Shields and Mr. Atkins. Both are quite adequate to the movie's requirements, and neither has much acting to do--Miss Shields's hardest job, for instance, is to pretend she is giving birth to a baby without ever having wondered why she's put on so much weight. Her second hardest job is to keep the wind from ruffling her hair.

Prom Night is a comparatively genteel hybrid, part shock melodrama, like Halloween, and part mystery, though it's less a whodunit than a who's-doing-it.

Not unlike an expensively tattooed panhandler, the couple elicit only a skeptical kind of sympathy.

Brubaker is an earnest, right-minded, consistently unsurprising movie about a penologist named Brubaker (Robert Redford), who sets out to reform a single corrupt prison and finds himself bucking an entire system, including the state administration that appointed him to his job. It says a lot about a movie that the only mildly interesting characters in it are those who are corrupt, such as the insurance-selling member of the prison board, played by Murray Hamilton, and a smarmy building contractor, played by M. Emmet Walsh, who attempts to buy Brubaker's neighborly good feelings with a homemade chocolate cake.

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.

Mr. Levinson, who both wrote and directed Diner, the small, exquisitely realized comedy about growing up aimless in Baltimore, here seems to be at the service of other people's decisions. Though entertaining in short stretches, The Natural has no recognizable character of its own.

Bustin' Loose is not unbearable, though a soft-hearted Richard Pryor is not a terribly funny Richard Pryor.

Thematically shallow but stylistically rich, Thirst Street is best enjoyed with a hint of its heroine’s willfully superficial vision.