Stanley Kubrick's production of The Shining, a ponderous, lackluster distillation of Stephen King's best-selling novel, looms as the Big Letdown of the new film season. I can't recall a more elaborately ineffective scare movie. You might say that The Shining, opening today at area theaters, has no peers: Few directors achieve the treacherous luxury of spending five years (and $12 million-$15 million) on such a peerlessly wrongheaded finished product.

Here, Lyne indulges more in misdirection than in direction; he's a magician turning a sleazy trick. But even his technical skill breaks down. The picture is garbled and cliched.

Sans emotional depth or narrative drive, Lee's latest flick is little more than a profane litany punctuated by Oscar-caliber orgasms.

This preposterous stalker flick, in fact, has less to do with America's favorite pastime or Gil's psychosis than with Hollywood's own obsession with blood sport. And for all British director Tony Scott knows about baseball, the thing might as well have been set in a cabbage patch.

Hinton was still a Tulsa teen when she wrote the best seller (4 million copies in seven languages) in the mid-1960s. Her brain wasn't mucked up with adult equivocation, so she didn't get into those confusing gray zones. Great for her, but not for Coppola, who turns this long-awaited story into baffling mush.

Despite Stallone's bantamweight attempts to insert, like, character into the fifth Rocky, it's the same old fight with the same old round of regulars. It seems silly wasting money on actors when the same could be achieved with Muppets. Rocky has little to do except shuffle around and mutter "cute" Rocky t'ings.

My Blue Heaven puts you in a stupor comparable to the one that comes on after Thanksgiving turkey. Written by Nora Ephron, it makes you long for the awful "Heartburn."

A punky, futuristic effort by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, it is a tasteless variation on "Sweeney Todd" set geographically near the border of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

Behind the trademark fancy package is a troubling sensibility, too. Spielberg seems unable to come to terms with anything real.

The Secret Agent, with its hemmed-in shots, feels like a TV production; what is said takes precedence over what is done. Even in the writing department, Hampton founders. [06 Dec 1996]

Figgis depends on his considerable ability to evoke mood in a symphony of image, montage and music. But these scenes, watchable as some of them are (and I don't mean the Fall of Man Follies), don't accumulate into much more than abstract mush. [25 Jun 1999]

Unless you're a Clint fan there's little other reason to sit through this one.

Once again, John Rambo guns amok in the name of American democracy, but he packs less dramatic firepower than last time. Rambo III, a poorly paced, much less involving show of guns and machismo, makes you miss "Rambo II" (okay, "Rambo: First Blood Part II").

Pytka's marginally successful at setting this gambler's fantasy against the Damon Runyonesque aspects of the horsy life.

Clue is based on the popular Parker Brothers board game in which the players try to guess, well, whodunit, and where, and with what weapon. You leave it with one conviction: stick with the game.

Its scope isn't broad enough to draw in the uninitiated.

For a quicker and more startling survey of Hong Kong stunts gone wrong, just check out the blooper clips that conclude any '80s Chan flick.

It's as pretentious and wispy as its title.

There are a couple of good things about the film, chief among which is Land's naturalistic performance. But the overall sense of it, heightened by a folk-guitar score so spare it feels like part of the soundtrack is missing, is not one of poignant minimalism but emptiness.

Its heart is vaguely in the right place.

It's hard to say exactly what the point is to this sour tale.

Unfortunately, the more traditionally drawn 2-D human characters are as flat, in every sense of the word, as can be.

In reality, Eros is a letdown, a collection of bagatelles that, with one exception, fails to live up to its promise.

The script's a plodder, and the acting's unbearably stilted. The movie's intentions are like the starry constellations that inspire the eponymous hero: out of reach.

This is billed as a romantic comedy, but it's much more boring than funny.

The stories are markedly different, but the acting seems remote and hollow, as if no one believes in what they're doing. [18 Oct 1996]

The result doesn't really work. The music videos don't seem connected to anything, and there's not nearly enough about the actual victims of the trade. But it's a documentary with its heart and its outrage in the right place.

A sex romp starring Andy Griffith? Holy AARP! The good news is that the seemingly perennial TV fixture is still funny and sharp and folksy. The bad news is that he lost the bet, or whatever it was that got him into Marc Fienberg's smarmy, lackluster comedy.