It's a kill movie, the filmic equivalent of a hate crime.

It's a lovely idea, and if the individual sections of the film were more substantial, or if we sensed some connection between them, some governing principle, it might have resulted in a delicate, poetically funny movie. Unfortunately, Jarmusch's lackadaisical minimalist aesthetic and his chronic lack of energy are the only unifying elements.

Spielberg and Co. have finally made their Disney movie -- or better yet, their film version of a theme park at Disneyland. It's sort of like "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "It's a Small World" rolled into one. It's a helluva contraption, and certainly one to be marveled at. It gives good ride.

Star Trek VI surprises us only by completely satisfying our expectations, by giving us exactly what we want from a "Star Trek" picture. It's not startling or revelatory, only witty, ebulliently good-natured and close to ideal.

My Girl may well have been intended as a tender way for parents to explain difficult subjects to their kids, but this botch of a movie explains nothing. Its fake nostalgia and cod compassion are as painfully awkward as adolescence itself and about as funny as a corpse.

Harrowing and funny, a fine film on its own, "Hearts" leaves us with a new appreciation for the Vietnam War epic it documents.

The Double Life of Veronique is a mesmerizing poetic work composed in an eerie minor key. Its effect on the viewer is subtle but very real. The film takes us completely into its world, and in doing so, it leaves us with the impression that our own world, once we return to it, is far richer and portentous than we had imagined.

Disney's new full-length animated feature, Beauty and the Beast, is more than a return to classic form, it's a delightfully satisfying modern fable, a near-masterpiece that draws on the sublime traditions of the past while remaining completely in sync with the sensibility of its time.

A laugh-in-the-dark funhouse ride that provides nearly two hours of slightly sinister sight gags and Gothic giggles, is creepy, kooky, even altogether ooky enough to satisfy any Addams addict.

Perhaps Steven Soderbergh's metamorphosis from clever Cajun auteur ("sex, lies, and videotape") to heavy-duty Eastern European angst-master has been altogether too successful. Like authentic Soviet Bloc cinema, Kafka makes its audience suffer along with its heroes.

It's a brutal, demonic film with a grip like a vise; it grabs you early, its fingers around your throat, and never lets go.

With its fancifully moldering sets and technical effects, Highlander 2 is little more than a barbarous arena, a Conanistic return to paganism for those among us who still laugh at violence.

Craven also wrote the script here, based on a news story about California parents who kept their children locked in the basement for many years. That's scary -- and so is how far Craven has fallen.

Leigh hasn't the affect of a poet, but he's a poet nonetheless. This movie captures the smallish details in life that perhaps you've felt before, but have never before seen on screen. He has a genius for the commonplace. It is truly sweet stuff.

Where Romero goes for the cheap, linear approach, Argento's storytelling is painfully poetic, with ever-shifting points of view and asides. It's not unusual for him to drop a Middle Ages dream sequence in the middle of things, rely on the unpredictability of a cat to advance the plot, or resort to pure shock that's no less shocking because it's expected: There's a madness in Argento's method and it's always appropriate.

Van Sant's sensibility is wholly original, wholly fresh. "My Own Private Idaho" adds a new ingredient: a kind of boho sweetness. I loved it.

A cross between an after-school special and MTV video, melding threadbare plot with colorful visuals and delivering a message, which is, basically, Vanilla Ice is cool, you know?

Producer-director Garry Marshall, who made a pretty penny off Pretty Woman, brings the same fizzy, dizzy feel to Frankie & Johnny. He seduces us with stars in our eyes and blinds us for 90 minutes or more to his ploys, some of them as cheap as dime-store perfume. Still, we're happy to sit back and swoon. [11 Oct 1991, p.D7]

Alongside this silly kiddie Halloween comedy, reruns of Hee Haw seem works of great comic sophistication.

David Mamet's Homicide is a brilliant muddle: compelling, exhilarating and, at the same time, profoundly dubious. Certainly there is greatness in it. And just as certainly the moral ice it skates on is precariously thin. It leads us into a forest of dark contradictions, then leaves us stranded, dazzled but bewildered, elated but perplexed.

Ricochet, the latest explosive, cynical thriller from Joel Silver, best known for engineering the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard blockbusters, should keep action freaks overstimulated for the next few weeks. [08 Oct 1991, p.E5]

An intimate, sentimental coming-of-age drama, a sweet little puppy love movie crushed by the enormity of its tragic twists.

An infectious albeit formulaic game of Cinderella football, this happy athletic romp seems to know just how wheezy it is, but the team grunts "hut, hut," and puts it right on the numbers anyway. It's "Hoosiers" with a pigskin pumpkin and a lot more sis-boom-bah.

A modern epic that fuses myth with hard-edged reality, it's a one-of-a-kind, thoroughly engaging experience.

You're going out with a touch of class: a slam-bang finale in 3-D -- make that Freddyvision; a gaggle of one-liners directed at the final crop of victims and a few in-jokes; some wonderfully bizarre dream sequences; and the possibility that while Freddy may be gone, some of his progeny may live on (we can say no more).

Commitments, adapted by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais from the Roddy Doyle book, exults in its own world. The characters, with their foibles and verbal joustings, are everything. There's something poetically sardonic in every sentence they utter.

Child's Play 3 is further proof of the principle of diminishing sequels: The original was actually quite good, the follow-up was lame and now what is hopefully the capper is DOA.

Directing with an eye to "Rebecca," Branagh brings more mood than suspense to this apparent hommage to Hitchcock. Still, he raises no goose bumps.

When they part ways at picture's end, Marlboro's parting words are "Vaya con Dios," which translates as "Go with God." I'd put it differently. Go, the both of you. With God or without, but by all means, go.

Like the mysterious, bound package Goodman gives Turturro (the contents are never revealed), the Coens isolate a small area of interest, bind it with psycho-atmospheric finesse, then wait for something significant to emerge. Even after a second viewing of this movie, it doesn't.

The movie is pure hound, but you'll want to catch Short's every pixilated move. He almost made me wish that the picture would never end.

There's one thing worse than a movie with two Jean-Claudes: A movie with two Jean-Claudes and bad fighting.

The film has a message; it's another picture about finding your humanity. But in this case, it's pedaled so softly that it doesn't impose itself on you. Nothing about this movie does. And that, as much as anything, is what makes it so irresistible.

Return to the Blue Lagoon, which doesn't star Brooke Shields or that blond guy, makes the original Blue Lagoon look like Citizen Kane.

Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's brilliantly entertaining documentary look into the New York subculture of drag queens and transsexuals, is a rapturous, desperate ode to self-invention.

Trust is always interesting. And always interesting, as someone once said, is always good.

Once upon a time [Brooks] was hilarious. And can still be, in interview, which is his true art form. But for some time now, his movies have not even cruised near the neighborhood of funny. And this one is the bottom of the barrel.

A most excellent sequel, funnier and livelier than the original.

With its energetic cast and insistent street score, it still manages to be poignant without becoming bathetic, and violent without being exploitative.

A lot of what Bigelow puts up on the screen bypasses the brain altogether, plugging directly into our viscera, our gut. The surfing scenes in particular are majestically powerful, even awe-inspiring. Bigelow's picture is a feast for the eyes, but we watch movies with more than our eyes. She seduces us, then asks us to be bimbos.

It would be cornier if it weren't so well acted by Nunn, Bening and 12-year-old Allen.

Linklater's control seems all but invisible here. But this kind of stylistic lucidity can only be the result of determined calculation and planning. The kind of happy accidents he captures don't come about by accident.

Visceral to the point of overkill (and beyond), a berserk blizzard of kinetic images, it doesn't even give you time to be scared.

A bit of advice: Get to "The Naked Gun 2½" on time and plan to stay till they turn the lights back on. The opening and closing credits alone are almost worth the price of admission.

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.

Director Ron Underwood of the big-worm thriller "Tremors" effectively contrasts the bland life of the big city with the rough-hewn joys of the Big Country. And the three leads -- neurotic, brash and bonding like flies to No Pest strips -- give energetic if obvious performances. The whole dang thing is rather too blatant, but if you take your comedy with a little branch water, you'll want a shot of this 'un.

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.

The most obvious problem occurs between Snipes and Sciorra. Lee's so interested in the ripple effect they cause, he almost forgets the affair itself. We see anger all over Harlem and Bensonhurst, but we're barely allowed into the main bedroom, where the real hell must be taking place.

A noisy, impenetrable and totally nonsensical cogitation on the nature of firefighters and the sizzling "animal" they love...We just wish somebody would call 911 for boredom.

It spins its wheels in a giddy sort of way, then puts the pedal to the mettle, lays rubber and fairly takes wing.

Merely airheaded where it should be lighthearted, Hudson Hawk offers a klutzy, charmless hero, and wallows dully in limp slapstick and lowest common denominator crudeness.

In Truly, Madly, Deeply comparisons with "Ghost" are inevitable. But this British production, starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, takes a wide berth around the kind of button-pushing found in "Ghost." It presses with lighter fingers.

While in theory this seems like an altogether valid notion, in practice it falls apart because Fred is such an obnoxious boil of a character. Instead of wanting to release him you want to deposit him in a Davey Tree Grinder. Painful death, that's what this trickster deserves.

As it is, fans of Candy are expecting a John Candy movie -- that is, a reasonably hilarious comedy about a sweetly sympathetic bumbler. And while he is as cumbersomely lovable as a Saint Bernard puppy, he's rarely allowed to be funny here. He seems miserably uncomfortable as a romantic lead, or maybe it's just that he's playing opposite the Stepford Actress.

It's an exhaustive, and exhilarating, document of an overwhelming lifestyle.

Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss star in this hilarious brain-teaser about a patient who suffers acute separation anxiety when his psychiatrist goes on vacation.

Unfortunately, Bosworth couldn't act his way through the Seattle Seahawks and he's not likely to act his way into a film career based on this first outing.

Screenwriter and sometime animal trainer Stewart Raffill directs from a screenplay by Ed Rugoff, who also co-wrote "Mannequin." Rugoff is fond of asking and answering the question, what if a mannequin came to life? But judging from "Mannequin Two," Raffill is probably better at sweeping up after elephants. The actors, bless their little wooden heads, would be better off pulling puppet strings.

The story line is little more than a shiny hat for holding the high-tech rabbits. Still, it's an enjoyable bit of smoke and mirrors, thanks to the decency and resourcefulness of its hero.

If it's subtle, insightful satire you're after, don't look to this coarse farce. It's simply more vulgar, insidiously homophobic Victor/Victoriana from the sexually confused writer-director.

There are a great many movies about the tragic experience of the Jews during the Second World War, but only a handful as passionate, as subtly intelligent, as universal as this one. In Europa Europa, Agnieszka Holland tackles a great theme and, in the process, has made a great movie.

If your teenage sons are looking for heroes, send them to Toy Soldiers. Even if they're not, send them anyway. They'll probably enjoy watching a judge being thrown out of a helicopter. Too bad the judge didn't take the script with him. Most reasoning adults will probably reject this far-fetched clash between American preppies and Colombian terrorists.

Writer-director Dearden, who earned his gruesome credentials as the screenwriter on Fatal Attraction, underlines his leading lady's lack of rudimentary skill by leaving the soundtrack full of dead air and amateurish articulation during numerous conversations. He's also repeatedly drawn to Hitchcock allusions that slip out of his grasp. [26 Apr 1991, p.E1]

Stallone is to humor what John Goodman is to ballet.

The moviemakers have set out to interpret the inner workings of abusive relationships in their boundless variety. Alas, their ambitions are far grander than their abilities.

Perhaps the shrewdest thing the filmmakers have done is call the film The Object of Beauty instead of A Thing of Beauty, which would make much more sense. By doing so they've removed what they must have known was a far-too-tempting opening for reviewers -- of saying A Thing of Beauty is not a joy forever. Even with the change, though, the sentiment fits.

Though it boasts a big budget and is indeed busier and more densely populated than Seagal's previous efforts, Out for Justice feels cheap, not only in its production but in its content. It's "Scarface" without a point of view; it's shallow plot cluttered with extreme violence, both verbal and physical.

Todd Haynes's Poison is a vision of unrelenting, febrile darkness. It presents three disparate stories in three greatly varied styles, all inspired by the work of Jean Genet, and its effect, as a whole, is like that of an especially vile infection; it moves diabolically through your system, spreading fever and nausea as it goes.

Brooks-the-performer embodies the movie's spirit with superb modulation. 

An elegantly wrought bit of nastiness.

Directed by Zhang Yimou, a maverick of China's "new wave," this disturbing tragedy is as unexpectedly lurid in its way as "Blue Velvet."

Jennifer Connelly is very easy to look at. Career Opportunities isn't. Go see the standee.

The humor, which made the first movie appealing to more than just TV kids, is far less adroit.

Grounded in a good cause but never puffed up or preachy, the father-daughter drama transcends the issues.

It's not a new subject, it's not a subject that requires a lot of moral deliberation -- we know who the bad guys are -- and Winkler has nothing new to say about it. Undeniably, his need to share his feelings on this topic is urgent; unfortunately, it is much more urgent than our need to hear them.

It's got a little kick to it.

True Colors rushes by at a hectic pace, never allowing the story to gain momentum. Despite good performances from the two leads, the film has the feel of a cautionary stampede. While it aspires to lofty heights, it never really goes much beyond the rules of behavior prescribed by the Boy Scout Handbook.

Parillaud is expressive but rather mundane. She's best at playing sullen, but there are so many French actresses who specialize in this particular talent -- the French have mastered the apathetic pout -- that she seems generic.

The "Godfather" films transcended their mobster genre; New Jack City doesn't, but it's a great genre film, edgy, vibrant and full of urgent color.

I don't care what Dylan said, everyone must not get Stoned.

Though creepy Jeffrey Combs and beach boy Bruce Abbott return as West and Cain, producer Brian Yusna has replaced Stuart Gordon in the director's chair, without bringing new life to the affair. Even the jokes in the Woody Keith/Rick Fry screenplay seem refried.

Nothing but Trouble, which distinguishes itself by being Dan Aykroyd's directorial debut and in no other way, certainly lives up to its name. But you could go far beyond that -- it's nothing but trouble and agony and pain and suffering and obnoxious, toxically unfunny bad taste. It's nothing but miserable.

Cadence might once have been pertinent, revolutionary or politically correct, but it's definitely out of step with the times

A smart, restrained entertainment, it doesn't splash around in blood and hysteria. It doesn't have to.

Taxes the threshold of acceptable cuteness.

Ultimately Sleeping With the Enemy wants to be about one woman's rebirth, but Roberts neither grows nor glows in this empty movie.

Never Ending Story II is as flat as the pages of its script.

Beware of horror films that begin with a bad dream -- they usually go on that way as well. Case in point: Popcorn, which has several good ideas that, unfortunately, go unrealized.

There's nothing embarrassing about Zeffirelli's brisk new version, nor anything particularly remarkable; it's an entirely credible, middle-of-the-road production.

Though slow and overlong, the movie is at least scenic family fare. This easily understood yarn should appeal primarily to boys who still think girls are yucky.

It is slightly disconcerting to realize that this pleasant but lightweight movie was produced, directed and written by Peter Weir. This means Touchstone Pictures didn't throw this the Australian director's way; he came up with it himself.

Unless you're a Van Damme or martial arts fanatic, you're more likely to be thinking: No, merci.

This real-life case of Misery sets your teeth on edge, your blood boiling, your adrenaline surging with the subtlety of a World War II propaganda film.

Except for a few gory flourishes and several jolly special effects, Warlock is a surprisingly old-fashioned horror adventure that benefits from the superbly malevolent presence of Julian Sands as said warlock.

The Godfather Part III isn't just a disappointment, it's a failure of heartbreaking proportions... It makes you wish it had never been made.

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.

Part cop caper, part coo-fest, it is a feel-good movie, a jolly little button-pusher about a street-smart cop who brings law and order to a classroom full of unruly but adorable youngsters.

One of those rare movie history lessons that don't make you feel as if you're facing the chalkboard. It's an impassioned movie, with vehement, soulful performances from Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek, but it's also a work of great restraint and proportion. 

Fans of the book will despise it, others will just find it tries too hard. If you want to see the masters of the universe chastened, see "Wall Street." This is a story of redeemed white guys.

In The Russia House, an extremely pleasant but lightweight espionage drama set in the glasnost age, Connery brings that charisma to bear and, with co-star Michelle Pfeiffer's help, makes the movie work.

Knee-jerk tears aside, there's nothing tremendously special. It's very watchable, but it doesn't stand out. Which is not to say the film is badly done; it's just decently done.

This movie, set in the '60s and starring Cher, Winona Ryder and Bob Hoskins, doesn't come of age so much as die of it. It's awash in mediocrity, waterlogged with innocuousness and redeemed only occasionally by sweet-faced Ryder.

Tim Burton remains the Wizard of Odd with this eye-filling if problematic confection.

The Rookie is like one of those maddening, waking dreams when you spend the whole night thrashing in bed while tediously repetitive images batter your racing brain. But at least morning comes. This movie, directed by Eastwood, never ends.

[Huston] brings a vital conviction to her scenes; they're scorchingly immediate, and her ability to get in sync with what Lily's feeling is what gives the movie weight. She may be the best we have.

This 138-minute film, comprising two thousand performers and a helluva lot of musketry, has several good scenes, including the well-known one in which Christian utters romantic praise to Roxanne from below her balcony, while de Bergerac feeds him lines. But it can't escape Rostand's structural shortcomings.

A weak handshake of a movie, it is slightly repellent -- hardly gripping, much less knuckle-whitening. This "Psycho" for fatsos is as self-aware as it is styleless.

Directed by the touchy-feely Henry Jaglom, this is film as purgative -- a hens' party from hell, gorged on its own self-importance and damned hard to swallow.

Bridge never quite gels into anything.

Beautifully outfitted and moodily photographed, the movie is directed by Stephen Hopkins, the Jamaican-born Australian responsible for Nightmare on Elm Street V. He keeps the pedal to the metal but never allows the explosive action to minimize his actors.

Please circle the sentence that most closely reflects your feelings: 1. To me, this scene sounds precious, cute, madcap, zany, lovable, heart-warming, poignant and funny. 2. I find this scene nauseating, despicable, moronic, simpering, formulaic, tacky and culturally dangerous.

The only good thing you can say about "Rocky V" is that at least Stallone has the sense to throw in the towel.

The movie has a big payoff; it's the setup that's the drag. But Kevin's antics will touch the budding subversive in every kid. My advice? Hide the car keys.

A gorgeously drawn myth made for plucky children and very brave mice.

Costner (with Michael Blake's screenplay) creates a vision so childlike, so willfully romantic, it's hard to put up a fight.

As the movie progresses, it becomes less interesting. There are some striking performances from the supporting cast, particularly Steven Berkoff's rabid portrayal of a rival gang lord. The rest of the film, in fact, could have benefited from a little of his mad-dog ferocity. As heroes, the Krays are more shadow than substance; they're stuck in metaphor.

Child's Play 2 is an inevitable sequel that's not as good as its progenitor, but better than most movies with the numbers 2 through 8 in their titles. Thin plot-wise, it caters to an audience apparently amused on the first go-round by the antics of a foul-mouthed doll named Chucky.

My 20th Century is like a dream, without a unifying logic -- ravishing fragments without coherence or meaning. Immersed somewhere in all this are Enyedi's meditations on the true nature of women, the shortcomings of 20th-century progress, and the connections between art and science. Yet though her own inventiveness and witty command of the medium are invigorating, her thinking is so scrambled that her originality is undermined. The movie is overintellectualized and yet not fully thought out.

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.

Vincent & Theo is more than art appreciation, it is a treasure in its own right, unframed and arcing in the projector's light.

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.

Dern's dirtball performance gives After Dark, My Sweet a desperately needed quality of slugged-out authenticity -- he gives the movie its edge. If anything, though, Foley makes Thompson's killing universe too inviting, too sunny and comfortable. He's missed the essence of Thompson, but all in all, there are worse ways of failing.

Like the jokes, the brothers' rapport seems recycled from childhood. Sheen and Estevez are hardly working.

The Witches is a wickedly funny final bow for Muppeteer Jim Henson.

Unlike "Heathers," a satiric treatment of teen suicide, Pump Up the Volume is passionately caring. It's a howl from the heart, a relentlessly involving movie that gives a kid every reason to believe that he or she can come of age. It appreciates the pimples and pitfalls of this frightening passage, the transit commonly known as adolescence.

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."

It is unsparing when it comes to gruesome descriptions and ominous characters, but it's got more giggles than goose bumps. The Exorcist III isn't about to scare anybody.

Unexpectedly likeable, thanks to the high-spirited performances of stars James Belushi and Charles Grodin, under the relaxed direction by Arthur Hiller.

What "Wild at Heart" feels like is a kind of housecleaning -- a disjointed collection of images and odd snatches of ideas that the director couldn't make room for anyplace else. They have no context, and as a result, no power to thrill or disturb.

Roger Spottiswoode's Air America is partly glorious, partly junk, but unfortunately not in equal parts.

What The Two Jakes makes us long for most is the earlier film.

Flatliners is a heart-stopping, breathtakingly sumptuous haunted house of a movie.

All canapes and haute bourgeoisie, it is a smart comedy of conversation, like "My Dinner With Andre" but with eight place settings.

A jazz piece may be improvised, sketched out in the process of creation, but a movie resists that kind of spontaneity -- or requires skills that are beyond Lee's talents at the moment.

A roundup of tired cliches and tired acting -- except for Sutherland and Petersen -- Young Guns II is dull as beans and lazy as tumbleweed.

Dugan has a brisk, imaginative comic style; he sets up his gags well, so that there's still some surprise in the punch lines when they come.

Close kin to Fatal Attraction, but more earnestly told, it is a cautionary treatise on the wages of fooling around in the office (death for her, despair for him). But mostly it is a solid whodunit, driven by subtext and the intensity of Ford, Greta Scacchi as the predatory other woman and Bonnie Bedelia as the wronged wife.

A jumble of subplots and suppositions, The Unbelievable Truth ultimately comes together as suburban farce in a door-banging conclusion to all the wild speculation.

No actor has ever been more contemptuous of his profession -- or the movie business as a whole -- than Brando; to him, acting is nothing, and his performance here shows his self-loathing, his desire to trash himself and his accomplishments. This isn't self-parody, it's self-desecration.

A heady blend of beefcake, derring-do and jingoism, their adventure is not merely action-packed, but well-built to boot.

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

It's formula-packed business as usual. In fact, it's double-packed, triple-packed, more.

As a screenplay -- as a story -- Change is a silly mess. Its direction is also perfunctory, a bland rendition of the usual chain of Hollywood events. But the main reason to watch Change is for Murray, of course. And no matter what formulaic claptrap is around him, he always redeems it with something comic.

Under the direction of "Die Harder's" Renny Harlin, the movie has a crackling pace and a glossy look. It's all the more pernicious for that, this slick glorification of hate and loathing that portrays women as sexually promiscuous and men as infantile, violent and feeble-minded. Here's one Ford that doesn't have a better idea.

A feature-length version of the popular Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, it's an elaborate social critique done in cartoon terms -- a combination of Care Bears and "Das Kapital." And for what it's worth, it comes closer to having an actual cultural vision than any other movie of the summer. That doesn't mean it's good, mind you, but for kiddies it's colorful and bouncy at least, and for adults it's weird enough to keep you open-mouthed with disbelief.

It's rambunctiously entertaining, a loop-de-loopy bumper car ride through a firecracker sky, all bright lights, sonic booms and impossible heroics.

If "Top Gun" was a stylish bimbo of a movie, all cleavage, white teeth and aerodynamic flash, then Days of Thunder is its paradoxical twin -- a bimbo with brains.

With its desensitizing blood lust, RoboCop 2 contributes yet another ugly note to this already demoralizing season of sadism. If things continue as they have until now, the body count at the movies may reach into the millions.

Betsy's Wedding is white cake and warm bubbly, not an unsuitable marriage, just a tepid one.

Dick Tracy is an ambitiously vainglorious effort, expensive, beautifully appointed, but at its core empty as a spent bullet. It asks us to read these comics without a grain of salt or a pinch of irony.

Nothing in the first Gremlins came close to being as bad as these early segments in the second one, and because the concept is no longer fresh, and the suspense over what's going to happen is lost, we're ready for the filmmakers to get on with it long before they've finished setting the table.

The movie isn't a disaster, and if you responded to the first one, its memory may carry you over the roughness, the excessive, ugly violence and lack of conviction here. Hill and his stars are merely going through the motions, but the motions are immensely familiar. If you've been there before, then you've been there.

The overall effect is like wading through hospital waste. Verhoeven, who also directed the maliciously stylistic "Robocop," disappoints with this appalling onslaught of blood and boredom.

From its opening shots, the film is like an invigorating elixir, a movie pick-me-up that delivers thrills and races your pulse but keeps your head in gear too. It's divinely frivolous, nearly perfect fun.

It would be hard to reduce filmmaking to its basics more than Fire Birds does. It's more video game than motion picture -- the first coin-operated movie.

Coarse and haphazardly engineered and never more than intermittently funny.

Screwball romance, action picture. Summer movie.

Class of 1999 gets a D for dumb, dull and derivative, and so what if director Mark Lester, who made "Class of 1984" eight years ago, is borrowing from himself? The latter was just a punked-up version of the original rock-and-roll high school film, "Blackboard Jungle." For this new venture, Lester has simply tacked on elements of "Westworld," "RoboCop" and "Terminator" in a blatant attempt to enroll the action faction.

X marks the G-spot perhaps, for this is an orgiastic comedy of terrors and errors.

Unfortunately, the fact that these particular stories come from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen King can't overcome the direction of John Harrison and the movie's basic television-level aspirations.

Edel gives us the grungy details of the atrocities without providing a context to give them relevance. In the end, the film's ugliness becomes ugliness for its own sake.

Bissett, to her credit, is the only one who appears to know that the movie around her is a near-classic of sexy absurdity.

This is a surprisingly inept tale about an evil nanny and a killer tree that's right out of Jason's woods. Despite a prologue that aims to excuse subsequent plot deficiencies and a finale that's as absurd as you're likely to find in a modern horror film, The Guardian is simply ludicrous.

Unfortunately, Lumet isn't the brawny social commentator he would like to be -- he's a Jimmy Breslin manque'. His script chronicles a complex, gargantuan evil, but his insights into urban life haven't progressed beyond those of his earlier films -- the chaos of conflicting interests and cultural hatred is one that by now we're more than familiar with -- and his storytelling style isn't compelling or tightly focused enough to keep our attention from flagging.

Spaced Invaders is a slight, obvious sci-fi parody that would like to be in the same league as Spaceballs, but doesn't even deserve the comparison.

Certainly the going is grim, and there's nothing socially redeeming about "Blues" whatsoever, but writer/director George Armitage's movie is also funny, stirring and full of great moments done in the pop-arty, lightly macabre spirit of producer Jonathan Demme.

Feeble....Director Tony Bill tries to give Mitch Markowitz's script a spirit of madcap abandon but instead achieves a kind of forced hilarity that's neither funny nor liberating. [11 Apr 1990, p.D4]

You'll probably have some laughs along the way in spite of your better instincts.

Despite its mixture of macabre slapstick and broadly stroked caricatures, the film has sleepy-time rhythms; it's easily the pokiest farce I've ever seen.

After the film's first few minutes I watched, neither entertained nor illuminated, with something close to total indifference... (Greenaway's) extravagances and attacks on taste seem less like the bravery of the courageous artist than the empty desperation of a charlatan.