The best way to appreciate this fitfully funny collection of japes and jests is to treat it like any teenage boy in your midst: Focus on the positives and know that even its worst is only a phase.

This is one movie that no one needs to relive.

It's wage earners versus employers, his same old pitch. No curveballs, no spitballs, no surprises.

Steven Brill, who has a small role in the film, constructed the screenplay much as one would put together some of those particleboard bookcases from Ikea.

As with most sequels, Addams Family Values is a thinner, airier reunion. For those who enjoyed the original The Addams Family, the flavor is still there. But you feel a little undernourished.

Marie Noelle fills the story with passion, debate and human contradiction. If the material ultimately eludes the director’s grasp, wandering off on unfocused tangents, it’s because of its ambition.

This movie’s condensed telling is somewhat bewildering, although the essentials eventually become clear. But then they’re really just a pretext for such fairy-tale wonders as an underwater city, a living island and a hummingbird air force.

The story often feels like a collection of (so-so) jokes, forcibly strung together in a tenuous narrative.

The movie's nowhere near the inspired funniness of its predecessors. But it often displays the same spirit. It's strung end to end with sight gags. Some fall flat on their faces. But, by sheer weight of numbers, many of them work. It depends on your ability to lower yourself into -- or steer stoically clear of -- the idiocy pit.

It's a monumental biopic that cheapens the hero's successes by glossing over the failures that surely also shaped the man.

A double fish out of water structure -- first she's the fish, then he's the fish -- but the movie doesn't go anywhere with it, mostly because the characters are such nullities.

Perhaps more banter would have helped sustain interest. As the body count burgeons, the surprises become unsurprising, and the climax proves anticlimactic.

These unfortunate innovations aside, the film, directed by Ivan Reitman, has moments when the old army joke is done well. Reason against discipline is always funny -- hero to sergeant: "I know I'm speaking for the entire platoon when I say that the run should be postponed until the platoon is better rested" -- but the kicker, that there really is a reason for the discipline, is necessary to the premise. [26 June 1981, p.17]

For a terrible movie, Used Cars certainly has its moments. Anyone braving the sleezy ad campaign will be treated to some wonderfully funny gibes at a larger-than-life target: the used-car-industry. The question is, do a few moments of satire justify an hour and a half of naked ladies, car stunts and chase scenes? That's what most of this movie consists of. [11 July 1980, p.27]

Witty as they sometimes are, Romero's ironies aren't subtle or devastating enough to justify lengthy comtemplation. "Dawn" seems like a good 80-minute horror premise stretched out at least half an hour too long. Moreover, the excess running time appears to be filled by repeated shootings, clubbings, stabbings and munchings, always vividly depicted, rather than further character exploration or mordant strokes of humor.

Playing a mentally unhinged, almost wordless naif who finds true love with equally nutty Mary Stuart Masterson, he's supposed to invoke the silent comedian, with a little Chaplin thrown in. But he's just Edward Scissorhands without the scissors -- or the edge.

Romero has some fun with cackling frat-style boors in the background, all of whom get their comeuppance. But by and large, the acting is extremely flat and strident, and shot in a much more conventional style than Romero's other movies. Romero, in other words, seems bored by the whole enterprise, less interested in the story than in sausage-making. [23 July 1985, p.E2]

The rift that opens between Bea and the two combatants feels somehow terribly contrived. From there until the requisite happy ending, the story loses some of its emotional weight, if not its humor.

Interiors imposes a portentous formality that seems deliberately starved of sensuous appeal. It's obvious that Allen has serious intentions, but they're expressed in bloodless, superficial, derivative ways. [29 Sept 1978, p.D1]

While it’s gratifying — and occasionally gripping — to see that story told in 12 Strong, the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film contains few genuine surprises, at least from a cinematic standpoint.

The Money Pit is Richard Benjamin's attempt to make a '30s comedy through the lens of Steven Spielberg -- there are contraptions and "smart" dialogue and, unfortunately, nothing to hold them together. [28 Mar 1986, p.D2]

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy promises to take off every so often, but the material proves too slight for buoyant fancy. [16 July 1982, p.C1]

Despite flashes of brilliance, strong performances and innovative camera techniques, the film never rises above the schmaltz of an after-school special.

Sutherland's not particularly strong in his role of the man who knew too little -- he's handicapped by obvious dialogue like "I was so naive."

It’s only upon reflection that viewers may realize that, despite its nominal title character, the movie never delves that deeply into who Gloria Grahame was, aside from a femme fatale slinking across a black-and-white screen.

It's a little like watching Hsing-hsing and Ling-ling attempting to mate, to see John Travolta and Debra Winger, as the simple couple in Urban Cowboy, spend over two hours trying to find a modus vivendi in a mobile home. They're sweet and it's amusing that they have so much trouble doing the obvious, but after a while you get exasperated and wish they would just figure it out and do it.

Unfortunately, screenwriter David Shaber hasn't laid the sort of tracks that can support a clever or gripping vehicle. The rickety foundation might be finessed by swift, dynamic direction -- the sort of approach William Friedkin brought to The French Connection or Walter Hill to The Warriors, an urban thriller Shaber also helped fabricate -- but newcomer Bruce Malmuth isn't agile enough.

Filmmakers ought to be granted time off for good intentions. Then, perhaps, those responsible for the prison film Brubaker could have gotten their do-good impulses under reasonable control, and used them to make a good picture, instead of a goody-goody one.

Talking-head interviews interspersed with reenactments reminiscent of cheap true-crime shows are the filmic equivalent of a polo shirt and khakis: blandly acceptable but uninspired.

After a fairly promising getaway, Romancing the Stone gradually chases its tail into enough melodramatic dead ends to deteriorate into an expendable runaround, all too easy to shrug off as a miscalculated clone of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

There are a few cheap thrills in Elm Street 3, but there are also plenty of effective effects, including mirrors-as-drowning-pools, Ray Harryhausen skeletal work and Freddy's body as a living frieze from hell. The film's major weakness can be summed up in two words: Craig Wasson. Wasson, who has the charisma of a bowl of wet chow mein, plays the sympathetic doctor who must try to outwit Freddy.

At its worst, River's Edge is crackpot sociology. Jimenez and Hunter use the characters' lack of affect as an indictment. The film has a hectoring, hysterical tone. It wants to find out why these kids, who have grown up in splintered, lower-middle-class homes, are like they are. They want to blame somebody.

It couldn't have been easy, of course, to orchestrate the continuity of an adventure movie in which most of the action takes place in an essentially invisible setting, but it's Lisberger's failure to orchestrate this aspect of the show that ultimately causes the picture to sag. Fascinating as they are as discreet sequences, the computer-animated episodes don't build dramatically. They remain a miscellaneous form of abstract spectacle. [10 July 1982, p.C1]

Jaws 2 isn't a disgraceful self-imitation, but one sampling should be enough. It may inspire nothing so much as a nostalgic hunger to see "Jaws" again.

Although Hamilton — who is not widely known to a general audience — is inarguably a legend in his sport, and an engaging enough subject, Take Every Wave doesn’t give us a reason to invest deeply in his story.

Social consciousness and cultural respectability are allowed to make deep inroads on the raunch, since the kids are suddenly congregated around the Drama Club and devote their major conspiratorial campaign to discrediting a bigoted preacher who threatens to interfere with the term play. [2 July 1983, p.C3]

As alternate history and a showcase for a fine Neeson characterization, “Mark Felt” offers an intriguing if incomplete view of a man who remains inscrutable, 40 years after the fact.

It's a dear and corny story, played with lovable grubbiness by Sally Field and Ron Leibman.

Attenborough's aims are more academic and political than dramatic. By following an initially wrongheaded white character, he clearly wants to reach out to similar audiences. Cry could have reached further.

Producer Ray Stark, screenwriter Neil Simon and director Jay Sandrich obviously intended to whip up a frothy, madcap entertainment in the tradition of the screwball comedies of the '30s and '40s. Their failure to "make one like they used to" incurs a double liability: In addition to wasting resources and disappointing expectations, Seems Like Old Times -- now at area theaters -- appears to trifle with an older and better movie.

Chock-full of celeb cameos, puns and contemporary camp, the movie is annoyingly hip. It wants to belong even more desperately than its title character, who yearns to be a god almost as much as Pinocchio wanted to be just plain human. Hercules, alas, is hardly in the same class with the emotionally compelling Pinocchio -- although on many occasions its hulking hero seems just as wooden.

Director John Milius, the barbarian behind Conan, co-wrote this anti-gun-control, anti- Communist, survivalist script with Kevin Reynolds. Sick and silly as it is, the idea could have been intriguing, had it gone anywhere, which it didn't.

Despite a glorious performance by Nicolas Cage as a vicious father, this vivid satire of a world turned upside down is marred by writer-director Brian Taylor’s sloppy filmmaking.

A knuckleheaded but amiable summer trifle, Stroker Ace is aimed straight at Burt Reynolds' vast heartland public.

The fly-on-the-wall film is fascinating at times, but less than essential.

As both a movie and a battle plan for ending the child-sex trade, “Stopping Traffic” is disorganized and incomplete.

You don’t have to suspend disbelief to enjoy Long Shot. You have to jettison it entirely, along with any sentimental attachments to archaic fundamentals such as sparkling dialogue, organic structure and genuine sexual chemistry.

To the detriment of their story, the filmmakers seem to have forgotten that even the most serious of kid-friendly films can benefit from an injection of fun while attempting to jerk tears.

The Paris Opera is a good representation of the struggle behind the spectacle. In movies, though, it’s sometimes best to even out those proportions — a little less absolute truth, and a little more bull.

Although Psycho II is obviously a travesty masquerading as a sequel, it's impossible to tell how deliberate the ludicrous aspects of the masquerade were meant to be. In fact, the best sustained mystery element of the show derives from stylistic sloppiness and confusion.

The wacky incongruity works when debuting director Mamet has tongue in cheek. But all too often he's rechewing film noir, Hitchcock twists and MacGuffins, as well as the Freudian mumbo-jumbo already masticated tasteless by so many cine-kids.

Jarmusch likes to make movies that are slow and desultory and unresolved, and to beat him over the head with his vision would be unfair. In Down by Law, he's made that kind of movie, but he's worked from the outside in. He's made a Jim Jarmusch film instead of just making a film; his self-consciousness leaves you at arm's length.

In Things Change, the gangsters and bodyguards, the lounges and limos don't got, whaddya call, da same allure. You watch the whole thing with a detached amusement, like a goon cooling his heels in the lobby, just waiting for things to change.

There’s an air of “High Noon” to Török’s drama, which features an intrusive sound design, including Tibor Szemzö’s jarringly contemporary score and sound effects that include the ringing of a clock tower, buzzing flies, rumbling thunder and noisy birds — which transition from pleasant tweets to ominous caws of crows by the climax.

Lorenzo's Oil, which is further encumbered by its funereal pacing and woebegone score, is definitely a remarkable story, but as told by Miller it isn't really an uplifting one.

Shelton's movie never quite transcends its cheap, baseball-card poignancy. You never get the feeling these pulp-fiction archetypes -- the young hack-writer and the aging bull -- are real people. [06 Jan 1995, p.N37]

To his credit, Heinz leaves their relationship hovering in a state of unresolved potential. If only more of the movie’s scenes were like that: left to play out naturally, without the need to hammer home a theme of coming together.

Visually, the film is arresting; Robby Mueller's images have a low-energy vibrancy. But Jarmusch won't come out of himself. He's got juice, but only enough for doodling. He's too hip to live.

Jarmusch documented the group's 1996 tour and includes interviews as well as concert footage from 10 and 20 years ago. An admirer, he lets the songs go on and on into those trademark endless, nearly hallucinatory codas. The music is good. But the film Horse goes a little lame.

Wind is about the huff and puff that's needed to win the America's Cup regatta. It's about tacking faster than your Australian competitors. It's about winning for your country and yourself -- to stirring music. It's also about an hour too long.

To director Scott and screenwriter Roselyne Bosch, the atrocities against the natives came about not as a product of evil but through Columbus's ineptitude as a political leader. Still, this failure -- and his frustration over never actually reaching mainland America -- renders him a tragic figure. Though he was the dreamer and pioneer who first set foot in the New World and brought treasures and territory to Spain, he died all but forgotten. The movie, alas, for all its wondrous beauty, is destined to suffer a similar fate.

The script is well stocked with snappy put-down humor, including on-target jabs at Dan Quayle, Jerry Ford and George Bush. But director Peter Segal loses his light-comedy touch after the first hour and makes an unfunny mess of the final, crackpot chase sequence.

This is a movie with an admittedly leftist slant. Some of the scenes are gruesome and powerful. But its politics are distracting, making the film less an artistic undertaking and more a political statement. [12 Feb 1982, p.11]

Volunteers is a collection of one-liners, mostly good, wrapped around an undeveloped story, generally dull. Despite its frequent glimmers of intelligence, it's an unsatisfactory comedy that yawns to a close.

A rather poetic costume drama jarringly interrupted by bits of modern banality. [02 Oct 1981, p.17]

Like so many modern movies, The Bounty appears interesting and even spellbinding when preoccupied with settings and textures, but maddeningly obtuse when obliged to clarify basic dramatic conflicts. [17 May 1984, p.E8]

What you end up with in Good Morning, Vietnam is a peculiar hybrid -- a Robin Williams concert movie welded clumsily onto the plot from an old Danny Kaye picture. And neither half works.

Movie tradition sets awfully high standards for these sorts of fatalistic, criminally compromised sibling relationships. Rourke and Roberts don't quite measure up. [23 June 1984, p.C1]

The Muppet Christmas Carol" isn't terrible, by any means. But it's resoundingly moderate, with merely passable songs by Paul Williams, and only occasional real laughter.

As long as the script tracks the men's relationship with the baby, the picture is lively froth. But when screen writers James Orr and Jim Cruickshank of Tough Guys stray, the story goes stale.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves has pomp and scale; what it lacks is something essential -- a sense of Once Upon a Time wonder, the exultant, heady thrill of legend.

A shameless Alien rip-off (it even uses a similar typeface in its ads), it makes no sense whatsoever. But don't hold the movie's utter unoriginality and brainlessness against it. A few laughs, a few popcorn-jolting scares—what more do you want on a hot summer night?

“Dunjia” is exuberant and visually inventive, notably in the ways it incorporates text into the images. It also benefits from engaging performances. But the story is motley and not very involving, and the anything-goes CGI undermines the battle sequences.

At times Mr. Holland's Opus is moving. But the sound it produces is that of a clockwork music box, not a great orchestra.

The aim is oddball romantic comedy, with himself and Mia Farrow embodying a funny-grotesque mismatch; unfortunately, the obligatory demonstration of attraction and compatibility between these characters escapes Allen; the affair degenerates into a mawkish botch. [27 Jan 1984, p.D1]

Screenwriter David Veloz makes his debut behind the camera with this stale and stodgily paced depiction of Stahl's highs and lows. The story, which Veloz also wrote, unfolds via a series of momentum-draining flashbacks. [18 Sep 1998, p.C07]

This is Disney's idea of a fright fest -- about as threatening as Jaws with Flipper in the title role.

It’s a mildly engrossing if wonky exercise in what could be called a kind of selfish activism.

At its best the movie displays a vital playfulness. But at its worst -- and there's far too much of that -- Alice continues Allen's endless, banal quest for the Big Answers. All, of course, at the mild-mannered elbow of Farrow.

While literate and coherent in digest-of-history terms, the chronicle of Gandhi's remarkable career as a mass political organizer and spiritual inspiration distilled from the biographical record by Attenborough and screenwriter John Briley remains grievously doting and squeamishly evasive.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Laugh a little bit, but prepare to be overwhelmed a lot.

In Cadillac Man, the new movie by Roger (No Way Out) Donaldson, Williams certainly has his share of Robin-esque rejoinders, but he never quite reaches the feverish sales pitch most of his fans are likely to expect.

Uplift winds up getting the better of “Don’t Worry,” in which Phoenix delivers an impressively committed performance that nonetheless can’t overcome the movie’s worship of Callahan’s most immature, solipsistic and self-dramatizing foibles. A movie that’s supposed to inspire winds up being irritating instead.

It takes every resource available to a recently minted Oscar nominee — but does almost nothing with it.

Disappointingly facile and unenlightening. Things are only interesting when Spacey is on screen, which makes a video rental worth it -- for that tour-de-force nastiness. [12 May 1995, p.N50]

The sexual backstory is a new twist, one the filmmakers handle with less finesse than is healthy for the argument that they ultimately make.

Ironically, the film is conspicuous not for its brio but its blandness.

At it’s core, it’s just another youth-culture flick about the search for love. It’s also a mediocre bid to join the shoestring pantheon of such filmic self-starters as Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It) and Kevin Smith (Clerks).

The mopey, midwinter atmosphere of Nancy becomes increasingly and oppressively bleak, leavened only by Smith-Cameron’s spot-on portrayal of her character’s trembling, painfully fragile optimism.

Although the film is little more than a slapstick showcase for the nosey-neighbor character Varney has played in TV commercials, it's not the slapped-together piece of work you might expect. The movie is fairly inoffensive, and younger kids may get a real boost out of its us-against-the-world spirit.

Like its protagonist’s fleeting relationships, the film never completely connects.

Bolstered by good supporting performances from Kyra Sedgwick, Janeane Garofalo and Ritchie Coster, Submission is a handsome-looking film that aims to fulfill the most meek, well-behaved implications of its title.

Belushi is fetching, though he plays a cliche'. But the movie would roll over and play dead without the talented German shepherd. Lassie was classy and Benji beguiling, but Jerry Lee is a four-legged Burt Reynolds, just made for fast cars and chase scenes.

With his teddy bear appeal, it's not surprising that there was more magnetism between Selleck and the Baby in "Three Men" than there is between Selleck and grown-up babe Paulina Porizkova (though the two femmes fatales are similarly gifted). And it doesn't help that this high-paid clotheshorse is a chilly beauty whose presence is as spare as her figure. It's hard for Selleck to look deeply into those far-focused mannequin eyes.

It's the feelings, the tears, the laughter, the stuff that makes Gene Shalit stand up and cheer. It's showboating time and if that's what you want, the "Magnolias" gangplank lies before you.

Although Ramen Heads is an interesting glance at the craft of ramen, it ends up feeling lukewarm.

While this HBO-produced, generically titled family caper isn't quite as dead as you'd expect, it doesn't exactly pulsate with comic originality. Borrowing from successful comedies of recent years, from Big to Risky Business, it bounces along with a familiar, pre-sold air.

Screwball romance, action picture. Summer movie.