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]