Like the novel, the movie means to be trendy but it is out of touch, though not exactly out of date. It has no recognizable center of interest, no anchor for our attention. It's a series of whoopee-cushion gags...More than anything else, The Hotel New Hampshire is exhausting.

Prophecy is full of lingering lap-dissolves and elegant camera movements that suggest history is being made. Leonard Rosenman's soundtrack music is so grand it could be played at a coronation, and it's so loud that it pierces the ears and threatens the head. None of this fits the movie.

This admiring yet sluggish movie mostly drowns its political revelations in sticky sentiment.

A confused horror film custom-designed for those who prefer their scares set in a clean, comfortable, architecturally correct atmosphere, rather than the usual Gothic settings.

The Rookie is an astonishingly empty movie to come from Mr. Eastwood.

It feels like an artifact from a particularly contentious past, a stale corn chip trampled into Party-convention carpeting.

The trouble with this skimmed approach is that by sidelining historical analysis, the film denies its audience the best defense against distortion, a rational necessity when interpreting a conversation that often seems to happen in code.

For all those out there who can't get enough of Prince, Under the Cherry Moon may be just the antidote.

In the end, the best thing about “The Many Saints of Newark” is that it makes you think about “The Sopranos,” but that’s also the worst thing about it.

Like a magic brew thinned into bouillon, Come Away folds spellbinding storybook tales into a mundane melodrama.

If “Created Equal” is trying to promote the conservative cause, it does so gently, and blandly.

Derivative as it was, ''Romancing the Stone'' did have a certain spunk, thanks to its contrast between the workaday life of Joan Wilder, romance novelist (played so gamely by Kathleen Turner), and the far-flung adventures into which the screenplay propelled her. Sadly for the sequel, the novelty in that contrast was more than used up the first time around. This time, through no fault of his own, the director Lewis Teague (the first film was directed by Robert Zemeckis) has little more to do than construct a retread.

Jagged Edge has harsh lighting, blunt performances, and artless, no-nonsense dialogue relieved by the occasional bit of excess color.

Tank is as immediately forgettable as a lesser, made-for-television movie.

Steel Dawn has been directed by Lance Hool to emphasize Mr. Swayze's biceps. The movie starts with the mysterious fighter standing on his head. Maybe it looks better that way.

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

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.

Resistance feels disjointed and dated.

It’s clear that Damon and McCarthy have thought through this man in considered detail, from Bill’s plaid shirts to his tightly clenched walk. The character looks as if he hasn’t moved his bowels in weeks; if anything, he feels overworked, a product of too much conceptualizing and not enough feeling, identifiable humanity or sharp ideas.

A busy, bewildering, exceedingly jokey science-fiction film that looks like a Star Wars spinoff made in an underdeveloped galaxy.

In Year of the Dragon, a busy and elaborate film that manages to be inordinately messy, his tactics are a constant distraction, dissipating the viewer's interest at every turn.

Slow, overlong and ridiculously overproduced.

Teachers is Arthur Hiller's attempt to do for public education what he did for medicine in The Hospital, and the results are very uneven.

The fight scenes are plastic and glossy. Hargrave mistakes gore for cool and technical prowess for choreography, deploying overlong one-take shots that look like “Call of Duty” outtakes. He does commit to the location, though, creating a properly global thriller with a fine ensemble cast.

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

Alan Rudolph's latest movie seems to be striving to say something but isn't able to break through the fog of his script.

Less a mob thriller than a ruminative drama about a life built around orders and betrayals, the movie takes an unusual perspective on a familiar genre but is weighed down by its dull, uneven pace.