There are so many problems with Graffiti Bridge. The major one is that this "contemporary musical drama" stars and was directed by Prince, who also wrote the script and the score. This may be four hats too many.

Graveyard Shift is the latest failed attempt to visualize what King imagines so well. The acting and directing are substandard. Even the hackneyed plot is barely turned over.

Romero and his original partners apparently made no money from the original, and Romero admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the reasons for remaking the film were "purely financial." It shows...This Night of the Living Dead is resurrected, but it's never brought to life.

While this sort of thing may have worked in the '30s, by today's standards it's half-baked.

What's missing in Quigley Down Under is precisely what is missing in its star. Selleck is a skilled light comedian -- he's at his best delivering a wry put-down to a British officer -- and he handles John Hill's bantering dialogue deftly. But for all his burly authority, Selleck lacks dynamism on screen. There's no danger in him, nothing unresolved or mysterious. He's likable, but something of a lug.

With Avalon, Levinson reaches into his deepest self, and an artist can't be asked to do much more.

This engrossing mystery-comedy peeks through the keyholes of the rich and infamous in a manner both droll and delicious.

Madsen may not be the most egregiously untalented of the new movie beauties, but she's close to it. As Dolly, she presents a Southern accent as ludicrous as any in captivity; she keeps trying for Blanche DuBois and coming out with Gomer Pyle.

Where the movie sabotages her, though, is by insisting that all she really wants is to be like everyone else.

All of the actors acquit themselves admirably, especially Stolz, who has a star's low-key magnetism, and the jazz stylist Harry Connick Jr., who makes his acting debut here as the drawling rear gunner. But the roles are too generic for anything like real depth. The fight scenes are about what you'd expect; they're competently shot, but even when they deliver thrills, every scene, every passage, is familiar. We've seen it all before.

There isn't anything here you haven't seen already in It's a Wonderful Life and a thousand other wish-list movies. Writer/director James Orr doesn't even do you the favor of speeding through the unoriginality.

Crossing should be watched not because it's their finest achievement (that's still to come), but because the brothers are keeping things refreshingly different and building a career, their minds still very much fixed on originality.

Between the gang's patois and Seagal's soft speaking, Marked for Death almost begs for subtitles; the breaking of bones, however, comes through loud and clear.

Ward has a mischievously good time. He makes this picture better than it deserves to be.

Rourke is, in fact, exceedingly creepy. There's an unpredictable, resonant menace in his eccentricity. But Cimino can't connect the movie's thriller elements to its themes. We end up spending way too much time indoors while this thug waves a gun at these poor innocents.

For Americans, the measured accumulation of detail can be frustrating. It's like listening to a story about someone you barely know and being forced to prompt the teller, "And then? And then?"

[Abel Ferrara's] specialty is a kind of hallucinatory tawdriness, and here, he's made a hepped-up film about drugs that plays as if the filmmakers themselves kept a healthy supply of the stuff at hand.

We're talking a thriller about property ownership. This is a yuppie conceit; this is not interesting to human beings. What's the moral behind "Pacific," anyway? Always Check Your References?

Bogdanovich, who worked with McMurtry on the Last Picture Show screenplay, adapted this one on his own. It's kinda like he tried to pare down the big ol' Encyclopaedia Britannica and couldn't bear to leave out nothin' -- a lot of Billy Joe Bob types talking guff and hogwash and settin' round the Burger King eating fried eggs. This is purty near the worst movie of the whole year.

It manages to keep you going until the end and delivers the appropriate payoffs as a generic-brand thriller.

The blarney and bohunkery builds to a shaky apex of nothingness, then ends with a slaughter in slo-motion, a romantic ode of blood, bullets and body parts.

All the characters mumble, perhaps out of sympathy for the Dutch Van Damme's ongoing struggle with their native language. As for plot, it unravels more quickly than the mystery facing Van Damme.

It's Mondo Machismo, Hollywood on safari, a self-aggrandizing epic reeking of man scent.

While it's obvious that Stanley has seen a lot of genre films, he's not yet learned how to make one, though his shortcomings are less visual than dramatic and narrative; things look fast, but happen s-l-o-w. This Hardware needs a grease job.

But for all the jagged, witty chatter -- and Streep and MacLaine do their tragicomic damnedest with it -- Postcard provides the most rudimentary and jury-rigged of outcomes.

One of Martin Scorsese's most brutal but stunning movies, an incredible, relentless experience about the singleminded pursuit of crime.

Watching John Woo's The Killer may be like eating popcorn, but it's not just any old brand; it's escape-velocity popcorn, popcorn with a slurp of rocket fuel. Its story is a collision of exuberant pulp, samurai mythology and modern, urban noir.

Darkman, as unnerving as a gargoyle, is a classic nightmare, elegant and sumptuous, everything "Batman" should have been. But we're numbed after a while, as we are by the grotesquerie of the nightly news. Then again, maybe that's Raimi's intention. His work is beautiful in its scary way, and never only skin deep.