Vincent Patrick, author of the best-selling novel, wrote the screenplay that gives the actors, including the superb Geraldine Page, plenty to run with. It just never gets them anywhere.

It's a one-joke movie, a funhouse ride, the cinematic equivalent of having a rubber spider thrown in your lap. But it doesn't matter if you reject the wispy script or the plot, which has as much substance as a spider's web; you'll jump every time.

In the end, Like Water for Chocolate is an overwrought potboiler that punishes Tita for her sexual freedom.

Peter Sellers, as Inspector Clouseau, puts on a lot of funny costumes and has a lot of funny accidents. It was a good routine in 1964, and it's a good routine 14 years later. But it has gotten sloppier over the years.

But forget the vet-cum-love interest and the fish. It's the canine (not to be confused with "K-9") stuff that really matters.

If it weren't for the good will that the stars have built up over the years, See No Evil would pass without notice; even with the stars, that's what it deserves. But these are ingratiating performers, even when working far below their peak. Watching them, you find yourself wanting to laugh even when the laughs are undeserved.

This is a movie about teen-agers that doesn't patronize them, which gives it a realistic, lived-in feel. [13 June 1986, p.D9]

Toy Soldiers is hardly deep, but it's diverting and so are most of the actors. First-time director Daniel Petrie Jr. knows his way around this roughhouse terrain -- he wrote Beverly Hills Cop, The Big Easy and Shoot to Kill -- and while he keeps things taut, he has yet to display substance rather than style.

Taking frantic aim at a fairly promising target -- American jurisprudence -- And Justice for All makes a trigger-happy, scatterbrained spectacle of itself. Although it shatters all over the screen, this would-be topical satire may strike enough chords among rabble-rousing yahoos to become a hit of sorts. Profoundly depressing sorts, that is. [19 Oct 1979, p.B6]

Anyone want to watch some guy pick up women? Especially a fat-lipped, insincere kid who says "Did anyone ever tell you you have the body of a Botticelli and the face of a Dégas?" Me neither. But luckily, there's a little more than that to James Toback's The Pickup Artist.

Director Fred Walton sets the audience up early for a 20-minute reign of terror and gracefully shocks them out of their seats in a final blitz. But he packs the middle with drawn-out dialogue and mindless series of chases and escapes that do little more tan pad the feature film into feature length. [19 Oct 1979, p.31]

Maddin keeps what could have been a one-joke theme interesting for an admirably long time. But eventually, it becomes, well, hard to breathe. There's something wonderfully unique about the project but the reasons for doing it remain buried.

The Little Mermaid is only passable. Even at its highest points, it cannot claim a place next to even the least of the great Disney classics.

Williams, might have been more aggressive. Otherwise, director Roy Hill has done about as well as you can when translating word to image, not only through plot, but via the repetition of symbols: primitive, obvious ones -- the toad, a death's head costume, a child's clumsy drawings. After two hours and 20 minutes, all the parables and paradoxes join in a sluggish whole. And we wind up where we began, up in the air without a tail gunner. [23 July 1982, p.11]

Schrader's second feature, Hardcore, is more confidently made than his first, Blue Collar, but it slips into a similar category: absorbing but unsatisfying. [10 Feb 1979, p.C1]

In Milan Kundera's novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the characters are pawns on a complex, philosophical chessboard with Kundera's didactic commentary accompanying every move. In his adaptation, director Phil Kaufman films the pawns, even many of the moves. But without Kundera's connecting presence and voice, the result is closer to Chinese checkers than chess...Very attractive and watchable checkers, sure

But there's something timid about the way in which Ernest Thompson has adapted his witty play for the screen version of On Golden Pond, as if it had to do an extra-hard job to prove itself appealing. [22 Jan 1982, p.17]

Stylistically, the film is all in small talk, too -- those television-perfected moments of everyday life that evoke recognition, rather than curiosity, about human behavior. But there's nothing in their lines or behavior that would make any of them irreplaceable in this sort of friendly group. [22 May 1981, p.17]

It's very funny in places, even sort of tender. But let's not get out of hand.

In one scene -- a costume ball on his ship -- Korman wears an archaic naval uniform and explains that is is an exact copy of "the uniform worn by Lord Nelson when he defeated the Spanish Armada." That's very funny, but one wonders whether anyone who understands why it is funny could enjoy the rest of the picture. [11 Aug 1980, P.B3]

The sequel ought to pacify fans of the original. A predictable mix of farce and sentiment, pleasantly paced by director Emile Ardolino, the story is not in the least demanding.

Most of the humor is sophisticated slapstick, which Depardieu mastered in the hilarious trio of Francis Veber comedies he did with Pierre Richard in the '80s.

Carvey is such a lovable doofus and Myers such a well-intentioned naif that it's hard to get down on them, especially considering that the heirs to their niche in pop iconography are Beavis and Butt-head.

But despite the overall thinness, there's a great spirit afoot. It's a TV-cultural guilty pleasure to see this charming, dust-covered series from the 1960s gussied up and ready to go. Which is why it will work better back on your TV screen.

Power Rangers is good junk.

For my money, the best thing about Affair is Shandling, whose amusing quips and facial reactions steal what little of the show there is to steal. You almost wish the story would switch to him permanently.

The Trigger Effect enjoys bursts of energy as people confront each other in low-budget groups of twos and threes, but it never becomes the subtly powerful experience Koepp was clearly after.

Early on, Lumet wastes too much time characterizing Newman, following him from bar to bar to bar. Though Newman plays a good drunk, his performance is far from intoxicating. When he rests his case, the jury goes to sleep. [17 Dec 1982, p.19]