Relentless parade of tragedy.

Clever enough; but, as is the case with all stalk-and-slash films, it becomes repetitive and boring very quickly.

Raoul Ruiz's absurdly overwrought phantasmagoria tries to recast the notorious Viennese artist's life as a kind of Divine Comedy: Inferno.

No Holds Barred is paced well, with broadly drawn good guys and bad guys. Somewhat problematic is the murky status of the wrestling fans in the film. The "goodness" of Hogan's character is so markedly contrasted with the grossness of the wrestling-bar patrons that the film actually appears to be criticizing its star's fans--who are, after all, also the film's audience.

There's no accounting for the success of this over the failure of Eastwood's infinitely superior Bronco Billy. The year 1978 was the year of heavy pictures, with The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, and Midnight Express. Perhaps people just wanted to sit back, eat some popcorn, and have a good old evening of cheer and laughter.

Comic Tommy Davidson, in particular, is hilarious as gangsta rapper Puff Smokey Smoke, who falls for Juwanna and then, in a twist lifted directly from the queen of all drag farces, 1959's "Some Like It Hot," decides he still loves her after she's exposed as Jamal. After all, nobody's perfect.

Predictable and ultimately saccharine, but occasionally enlivened by Wayans's rather vicious comic sensibility.

It's fast and furious, but suffers from an overstuffed plot.

Though ultimately flawed, the film's depiction of velvet-gloved cruelty and matter-of-fact betrayal is surprisingly potent, and it's pure pleasure to watch Bacall prowling the corridors of power, tossing her golden mane and tossing off world-weary observations in a voice pitched somewhere between a purr and a growl.

A handsomely produced but unintentionally risible film that mistakes high grotesquerie for high gothic.

The main attractions here are Greenaway's densely textured compositions, each one a triumph of symmetry and design.

There are only short bursts of action in between nearly endless talk in the Clements script. Despite a huge cast of very competent actors the film misses the mark.

Unceasingly vulgar and sporadically funny, this revenge comedy rests heavily on the shoulders of former SNL wiseacre Norm Macdonald.

In the final analysis it all feels very much like a successful acting exercise that while psychologically acute, doesn't really bring much more to the table than what we've already gleaned from a few episodes of "Oz."

The film suffers from some action and plotting that is questionable in a children's film. The villain is far too malignant, the young vigilante hero seems to be a kiddie Rambo, and some of the action is quite violent, if not tasteless.

Love Story is actually better than Segal's previously released best-seller (written from his screenplay in order to promote the film). But then that's not saying much.

By now the "Ten Little Indians" method of killing characters one at a time has gotten so stale that no matter how impressive the monster is, the resulting sequence is inevitably tedious.

While the filmmakers haven't bothered to come up with a novel approach to very familiar material, the final product is a reasonably entertaining film that will interest children without putting their parents to sleep.

This strikingly beautiful anti-western is filled with arresting images.

This energetic hip-hop musical barely supplements the large-scale musical numbers with its cliched plot, but it does capture a sense of the break-dancing craze and is more entertaining than most of the films made to cash in on that trend.

Though filled with witty lines, fast-paced overlapping dialog, and screwball situations, this film too often sinks to Police Academy-style stupidity. The only reason Who's That Girl works at all is because of Madonna and Dunne.

Suspenseful throughout most of its running time and exceedingly well shot, ROAD GAMES collapses at the end. The confrontation between Keach and the killer is a let-down. Although director Franklin has definitely studied his Hitchcock (he would go on to direct PSYCHO II), his film lacks the psychological depth of the master's work. Keach, however, is very engaging as the eccentric hero.

The end result is a series of stylish vignettes, some entertaining and all variations on essentially the same theme.

Grace fares better than Linney, and both escape with more dignity than Harden, whose blowsy, wanton Missy is a coarse, soap-opera caricature of a suburban hoyden.

If you're charmed from the outset, this is an enjoyable trifle; if you're not, it never gets any less mannered and convinced of its own wit.

Unfortunately, the remake is as toothless as the original and gets bogged down in the humiliations of the Harpers' down-slipping life.

The film is relentlessly formulaic -- it's like a super-sized Afterschool Special with PG-13-rated bad language -- and is weighed down by Trevor Rabin's bombastic score, which telegraphs the appropriate emotional response to every feel-good moment.

Armstrong is fortunate to have the luminous Blanchett, who, along with her equally fine supporting cast, helps compensate for what the film lacks.

Sarandon is terrific and Penn is in top form, but the film is an achingly earnest message movie with a curiously muddled message.

The whole thing is fun for 11-year-olds of all ages.

Though many of the risks she takes don't pay off, Elster's film contains a number of stylishly staged set pieces.

There are some good moments in SOUL MAN, but Gross steals the picture; he has the best lines and makes the most of them.

The characters are two-dimensional and the story is intensely formulaic.

Overall, this is a fuzzy, unfocused drama that bites off more than it can chew, or viewers can digest.

There are some decent special effects, but overall it's about what you'd expect from a movie inspired by a line of toys.

The title refers to a diorama at New York City's American Museum of Natural History that depicts a whale and a giant squid locked in mortal combat.

The film's Buck Rogers-style graphics are cool, but the shrilly squabbling brothers -- realistic though they may be -- are insufferable, the story's your-turn/my-turn structure is tedious, and its relentlessly reiterated message about brotherly love and cooperation is really grating.

Wobbles unsteadily between broad humor and paranoid thrills. The result is a bland muddle.

Light, formulaic and soft around the middle.

A stylishly shot thriller with several hair-raising moments.

Makes you wish consumer automobiles were built to NASCAR safety standards.

Van Sant's film feels as dated as Hitchcock's, and Hitchcock's has the better excuse.

That's not to say it isn't entertaining, only that the scenes which rely entirely on the fragile interplay between Jessica and Ryan suggest a more compelling movie that got lost in the welter of high-speed highway recklessness.

The film is talky and much of what is said is didactic, but it is never really preachy. Washington brings tremendous intelligence, dignity, and charisma to his Biko. Kline is also very good as the editor who goes from talking a good liberal game to living it, giving up virtually everything so that he can make the truth known about Biko.

The cast is strong and work together flawlessly, and romantic comedies that take an unabashedly male perspective without being relentlessly vulgar or misogynistic are rare indeed.

Nearly strangles in its own stylishness but benefits from smoldering performances.

The message this oddball film propounds is pretty much standard stuff on the Oprah circuit.

An unconvincing and uninvolving psychological thriller.

Green and his regular cinematographer Tim Orr have a feel for the sad, generic landscape of small-town America, but rather than adding to an overarching melancholy it only reinforces an already drab, at times bizarrely comic tone.

Lesser Peckinpah, but fascinating nonetheless.

Gorgeous but seriously unsatisfying.

A predictable amalgam of every military-academy movie you can think of.

Your ability to overlook the film's myriad contrivances will ultimately depend on how you react to little De Roma.

The sky-high sleaze quotient -- lascivious priests, amateur porn movies, teenage hustlers and institutionalized corruption of every kind -- ought to guarantee fun for all, but heavy messages keep poking through and spoiling everything.

Fans of cheesy '70s TV shows will also be pleased by Wonder Woman Lynda Carter's brief cameo appearance as the governor of Vermont.

Another of Cassavetes' puzzling, personal, neurotic, and often brilliant productions that would have benefited from editing with a scythe.

In the end it appears that the problem is less divorce per se than immature and deeply selfish parents who should never have had children in the first place.

A gentle comedy about two misfits--a schizophrenic girl and a boy whom earlier generations would have called an odd duck--who find love, Benny & Joon means well but overdoses on whimsy.

Often annoyingly vulgar and crude, Life Stinks is partly redeemed by Brooks's good intentions. He and his associates have attempted, sometimes with great success, sometimes not, to illustrate the difference between decency and deceit as well as the painfully thin line that separates pleasure and happiness from degradation and despair.

The film's spirit is one of unbridled bawdy slapstick, which misfires as often as it hits its targets, and its attitude towards women probably won't warm many hearts in the feminist community. In short, Penthouse readers will find what they're looking for in abundance wrapped in a typically bright, fast and furious Hong Kong package that is sometimes funny and occasionally even genuinely erotic.

While the cast and songs are top notch, the predictability of the madness makes it pretty clear that this musical shouldn't have left the stage

Watching this thinly written, intellectualized caper film, one realizes how far downhill we've come since Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise or even Jules Dassin's Topkapi. If Object of Beauty were to have worked as a comedy of manners, it would have needed a director with some champagne in his bloodstream and a cast with some insouciance in their bones.

In time-honored Hollywood fashion, PHENOMENON suggests that smart people are friendless freaks who'd be far better off if only they were just as dumb as the rest of us.

Gimmick or no, the film is really rather silly and not particularly scary.

More shaggy dog story than a contribution to the ever-growing mountain of fact and fiction dealing with the Kennedy assassination, Neil Burger's feature film debut is a cleverly crafted but ultimately hollow mockumentary.

Ice Castles collapses under the weight of sentimental overkill.

Tries to be all things to all people and winds up a tedious muddle.

Made in 1988 but unreleased for several years, BORIS AND NATASHA isn't truly wretched, just undernourished. It tries hard to revive the anarchic spirit of Jay Ward's cartoons, but Boris and Natasha were only supporting characters there and nothing is done to make them interesting over the course of a feature film.

The impish Wood is a little light as Sean, who's inextricably bound by same family ties that robbed him of a promising future and made him a fugitive from the only life he's even known, but the supporting cast is top-notch.

An appealing, if decidedly unconventional, buddy picture that seems to channel "Midnight Cowboy" while going its own quirky way.

The plot of STRIKING DISTANCE is full of implausibilities, but they're entirely beside the point, since the film delivers what it promises: tough talk, chase scenes by land and by water, plenty of explosions, and pretty girls murdered in nasty and imaginative ways, served up with a dash of sex and a generous helping of knee-jerk cynicism.

A barrage of pop-culture jokes, time-travel high jinks and plucky orphans that's as confusing as it sounds, and riddled with plot holes to boot.

A hokey monster mish-mash that plunders the richly textured histories of Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein's monster.

Features a nutty mix of broad comedy, romance and maudlin melodrama.

Hero claims to be a gentle, playful parody of the action/adventure genre, but comes off as a mercenary attempt to cash in on summer movie-going habits.

Whatever Howard's reasons for keeping things so stale, it was a bad choice, but lucky for viewers, some stories are just too crazy for even the dullest storytelling to completely ruin the fun.

Granted, the film is a technical marvel: The many chases through rooms, under floors and behind walls -- including one very scary encounter with a nail-gun -- are all done to jaw-dropping, state-of-the-art perfection.

The problem with RUNAWAY is that it never reaches deeper than a playful level, amounting to nothing more than great but shallow entertainment. Selleck provides a thoughtful performance, coming across as a real, feeling person instead of the expected Rambo-esque tough-guy stereotype.

A good opportunity to catch some marvelous acting.

Released at a time when the western was undergoing some radical changes thanks to films by Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, The Train Robbers harkens back to the old style westerns Wayne helped make famous. What's lacking is substance and style.

Much better than you'd expect, largely thanks to an extremely game cast.

The result is studded with brilliant moments and an eccentric cast.

Swank and Elba work hard for their paychecks, but Rea quite literally phones in his performance.

Even worse than its hypocrisy, gratuitous homophobia and cheap proselytizing, the movie is dull.

While sometimes evocative, they don't add up to a satisfying movie any more than, as several characters are cautioned, coffee and cigarettes constitute a healthy lunch.

Overlong, overblown, and badly scripted.

Has an intangibly charming goofiness about it that is somehow endearing: here is a movie about teenagers that contains no excessive profanity, no drug references, and no explicit sexual activity.

The film uses the locations well and Gazzara's performance is an actor's dream. But SAINT JACK never quite becomes the "important" film it seems to aspire to be. The story is told in too meandering a style and the many well-acted characterizations never mesh together.

The whole thing is played for laughs, with a pseudohip sense of humor satirizing everything from suburban punks to the military, while delivering a few legitimate chills.

The film is pleasantly humorous, though the jokes are aimed at those interested in history.

It all adds up to an unfortunate misfire: a film at odds with both its source material and itself.

Not bad enough to be good.... This vigorous, pinheaded action flick asks us to accept Cindy as a lawyer.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Ethan Hawke's second feature, an adaptation of his own novel about youthful heartbreak, is hobbled by its singularly unappealing lead characters.

As these films go, School Ties is more simplistic and has its dice more loaded than usual.

THE CARE BEARS MOVIE, like other animated children's films of its ilk, is a double-edged sword. On one hand, this is perfect viewing for three- to six-year-olds, while at the same time it is little more than a 75-minute advertisement for the vast array of Care Bears toys and products.

The rhythms of Charlotte's mannered, artificial dialogue are better suited to stage than screen -- each segment started life as a one-act play and overall the film works better as a conversation starter than drama.

The result is an inconsistent, incoherent anti-superhero action-adventure comedy.

Overall, it's a curiously lifeless affair.