While one could wish the film offered something more original than its strictly formula heroics, it benefits from a generous portion of charm. And most kids attending 3 Ninjas are likely to stand up and cheer the rousing, action-packed finale.

Every so often, a neat little moment will appear and RAISING CAIN will appear to be getting back on track, but like his schizophrenic villain, De Palma always winds up letting his worst instincts get the better of him.

If you've seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer's poster, you've seen the movie. Otherwise, this pallid crossbreeding of vampire horror with Valley Girl vamping has no surprises.

The end result is a film that tries to do too many things at once and does none of them quite right.

Paper-thin.

Given a better structured screenplay, Mistress might have given The Player a run for its money. Instead, it merely offers glimmers of what might have been, and settles for being a cinematic footnote.

Despite the impressive special effects, Honey, I Blew Up The Kid offers few surprises. The visual gag of a giant-sized infant is the only real joke the film has and it wears thin in a hurry. The plot is perfunctory and simple, presumably to cater to the attention span of a pint-sized audience.

Cool World's numerous plot holes and illogicalities might be forgiven if it had interesting characters or impressive visual effects.

Bleak and beautiful, GAS FOOD LODGING is a richly evocative look at lives in waiting.

A deeply satisfying film, THE BEST INTENTIONS, honored with the prestigious Palm d'Or at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, uses its considerable length to examine the early relationship of Bergman's parents with uncompromising thoroughness.

More interesting than entertaining and too long by far.

The acting is consistently good, with Liotta, in particular, creating a masterful portrait of implacable, blue-eyed terror--a man equally at ease explaining his vocation to a class of schoolkids ("I'm here to be your friend") as staging a cold-blooded murder. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

Director Tim Burton and his screenwriters bring a heavy-handed, plodding realism to bear on what should be pop-mythic material.

HOUSESITTER starts out slowly and never stops being implausible or predictable. Neither Steve Martin nor Goldie Hawn do anything we haven't seen them do before, and neither of them play especially likeable characters. The strange thing is that, despite these failings, the movie is obstinately, sometimes painfully funny.

More ambitious than the usual low-budget horror item, SOCIETY doesn't develop its provocative idea--when the rich feed off the lower classes, they do so literally--to the fullest, but has its share of intriguing and chilly moments along the way.

As the Fat Boys demonstrated in DISORDERLIES, the social stridency of rap music does not mix well with crude, antediluvian slapstick. And now Kid 'N' Play, the popular rap duo that scored high-energy hilarity in HOUSE PARTY, offer further proof with the intensely juvenile CLASS ACT.

Director Emile Ardolino largely saves the day by coaxing winning performances from an excellent cast. Goldberg's work here never loses its edge or originality, allowing her to shine opposite Smith, who is so good that she barely seems to be acting.

Far and Away plays like a theme park attraction: viscerally exciting but detached, impersonal and dull.

For the most part, anything resembling a genuine plot is pushed back to give a showcase for Shore, a scenery chewer without conviction or noticeable talent, whose deficits as an actor and comedian have evidently remained safely hidden in the zap-happy MTV format until now.

Zentropa is as muddled as it is stylized.

More of the same, but it's now so far removed from any sense of reality, and done with such ham-fisted insistence, it's become a clumsy parody of itself.

Poison Ivy doesn't exactly keep one at the edge of one's seat throughout, but it certainly holds the interest.

Very fast-paced, SPLIT SECOND is an example of the men-versus-monster genre, with a British setting providing a fresh twist.

Instead of leading to a crafty, emotionally cathartic payoff, WHITE SANDS gets more tiresome and banal as it goes along and all its threads are tied up with neat, if outlandish, explanations. WHITE SANDS would have been a better film if it had remained more dreamlike and less tied to plot mechanics.

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.

DEEP COVER has a shaky beginning and a hokey ending but, somewhere in between, it becomes a movie of considerable power--largely thanks to the contrasting styles of its two stars.

Sumptuous production values and fitfully impressive choreography notwithstanding, Newsies was a major misfire for Disney Studios.

STEPHEN KING'S SLEEPWALKERS is an unusually stupid and tedious film that seems aimed at viewers who have never seen a horror movie and will therefore be shocked and surprised by the idea that such apparently nice people as Mary and Charles Brady could be murderous, shape-shifting energy vampires.