The director, Hugh Wilson, aims for harmless froth, and what he winds up with, as the hysteria level rises, is something brash and strident.

Schlesinger, working from a script by Malcolm Bradbury, maintains a steady rhythm and a light, cheerful mood that seem to reflect the brisk sanity of the heroine.

The movie is fairly entertaining; it's too bad the guest of honor is such a drag.

Garofalo has a certain barbed charm, but it's put to shallow use here.

Duvall and Jones wear their roles like broken-in work clothes, and the screenplay has a drawling Southern rhythm that's very pleasing.

Despite some expert performances --the picture remains as confused as its hero; unlike him, it never does find its identity.

Oddly, the funniest performer here is Gene Hackman, playing an aggressively straight, family-values-spouting politician. Hackman's deadpan inanity is sublimely comic.

The movie is disjointed and, at times, unintentionally funny, but its ineptitude is so good-natured that it makes a charming alternative to the mind-numbing professionalism of American action movies. [23 Feb 1996]

Meanders pleasantly, like a road movie, with a seventies-style, anything-goes offhandedness that whisks the audience through the rough spots.

It's too long by half an hour, and the director, Ted Demme, can't hold onto a rhythm, but the actors are uniformly sharp, and so are the actresses.

The movie's horror-comics second half is cheesy, derivative, and ultimately a little wearying. But it's also unpretentious and insanely cheerful.

The sheer ineptitude of the movie is supposed to be funny, but there's no lunacy behind it: Shore and his writers are like comedians on Prozac, smiling through the fart jokes without a hint of desperation.

But finally the film is no more than a flamboyant curiosity, replacing the spooky obsessiveness of "La Jetée" with a much tamer kind of weirdness. Also with Brad Pitt, in a showy role as a voluble lunatic; he's dreadful.

The movie takes time to warm up, it weakens into soppiness at the end, and the game itself, if you think it through, makes very little sense.

The easy-to-follow screenplay, about the rivalry between two toys -- cowboy Woody and spaceman Buzz Lightyear -- should excite young children; teen-agers and parents can enjoy the brilliantly executed action sequences.

It's a shame that the movie whose coattails these wonderful actors are attached to is such an empty suit.

Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein's script promises more fun than it delivers, slowly frittering away its store of jokes and thrills.

But ultimately all that melancholy stifles the characters.

But, like Jerry Lewis, and, to a degree, Steve Martin, Carrey can make the idiotic seem inspired, and his manic mugging creates some big laughs.

It treads enjoyably over old ground, and it has a surprisingly foul mouth, though rather than cruising along with the ease of Allen's best work it tends to hobble, and it closes in a flurry of undecided endings.

The plot would seem more ingenious if the movie itself didn't copy so many other thrillers (notably "The Silence of the Lambs"), and if it weren't so easy to spot every twist half an hour in advance.

The pointlessness would be vastly more appealing if Wang and Auster didn't make such a point of it.

The picture has a lovely, understated autobiographical lilt.

A modest, skillful, unfussy genre piece that tells an exciting story and lets its more serious concerns remain just below the surface, gently complicating the smooth-flowing rhythms of the narrative.

Though Lee still can't resist a fancy visual trick from time to time, Clockers is, at its best—in its compound of the jaunty and the depressing—his ripest work to date.

What fun there is derives from the smart editing (Rodriguez did his own cutting, and he's quicker on the draw than most of the pistol-packers) and from Antonio Banderas, who, stepping neatly into the Mariachi's boots, lends irony and calm, and even a trace of sweetness, to a nothing role.

But soon the movie falls flat under an uninspired good-versus-evil plot and pathetically simpleminded dialogue.

But the cut-to-the-enlightenment dramaturgy of Ronald Bass's screenplay feels desperate and false.