Black Rain is chock-full of moments, jazzy scenery and snazzy bits of dialogue, and stuffed with steroids. It's big, maybe too big for its shallow notions and commonplace structure. But it is also beautiful and terrible in the same ways that other Scott movies have been eye-filling. With its teeming Asian landscape, its dark kaleidoscopic palette and its heavily layered composition, it's reminiscent of Blade Runner. But this is an atmosphere that needs Sam Spade, not Dirty Harry.

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."

Price and director Harold Becker build in enough jumps and scares and good red herrings to be satisfying -- there are a few especially heart pounding moments in which Keller's sense of helplessness in his own bedroom is palpable -- but a few logical holes may appear when you talk about it afterwards. Still, Sea of Love is leagues deeper than the average buddy movie.

This Australian film by New Zealand director Jane Campion comes at you, and keeps coming at you, in peculiar, oddly enchanting bursts of detail.

An uncommonly warm, relaxed little movie, the kind they call a "feel-good film," but without a cloying artificially-sweetened aftertaste.

Hackman isn't giving a "Mississippi Burning"-caliber performance here, but it is a well-crafted one. Jones has the actor's advantage in the villain's role of a cynical soldier who comes to like but not respect the sergeant. The supporting players skulk and menace effectively, and Cassidy adds an earthy oomph to her tag-along's role. Of course there are also the customary chases, crashes and gruesome murders. In other words, it's the best in mindless entertainment.

They don't come any cuter than The Adventures of Milo and Otis, a heartwarming, tail-thumping story about a curious kitten and his pug-nosed puppy pal. It's totally awwwwww-some.

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

But don't let a little gore, misogyny, factbusting, counterfeit hipness and screenwriter David ("Streamers") Rabe's public disassociation from the project get in your way. Enjoy Penn's actor imitations. Or Fox's raspy earnestness. Or scorer Ennio Morricone's sentimental mortars. Or a bafflingly anticlimactic final sequence in which veteran Fox appears to come to terms with himself with the help of an Asian woman and a dropped scarf. Is that what you call a wrap?

Uncle Buck is competent comedy, a bit simplistic, a bit stale, no gremlins, no gushiness, no surprises. A Hughes movie offers the kind of reliability you expect from major household appliances or a good set of radials.

"5" has none of the pizazz of "1" and "3" and is only marginally better than "2" and "4," the worst of the "Elms."

How many times can we be awestruck by Day-Glo Gumbies? And why do these creatures always travel with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?

The writer in Soderbergh proves the ultimate weak link. In sex, lies' last third, he seems seized with a compulsion to make sense of it all, bring everything to bear, give everyone their moral comeuppance, their screenplay payoff.

Put the whole movie down to cartoonery...This is a drive-in theater battle of wills between the forces of evil and the forces of good.

Weaned on the homilies of "Happy Days" and the hominy grits of Mayberry, Ron Howard brings sitcom aphorisms to bear on the sticky-fingered realities of the beamish Parenthood.

Howl and damnation, if this isn't just one long, stomach-turning drool joke.

Also zero, which is the amount of inspiration and achievement in this continuing saga of the little boy who drowned in Crystal Lake 30 years, seven films and approximately 286 teenagers ago (30-7-286)

UHF is not a uniformly funny experience, unless you have to wear a bib and tend to laugh at anything, such as sudden gusts of wind. Yankovic, co-writing with manager Jay Levey (who also directed), goes for gag after gag. Some hit, some miss. You laugh, you cry.

The picture is heartfelt and naive in ways that seem totally secondhand. The questions it asks -- This boy or that boy? Should I or shouldn't I? -- have been played out in countless other coming-of-age films, from "Where the Boys Are" to "Dirty Dancing." And though the palpable enthusiasm of its creators carries you further into the film, and further into the lives of the four friends than you might otherwise go, it is eventually replaced with a sense of weariness at the worn-thin material.

It's time to find a new Bond. This one is tuckered out, spent, his signature tuxedo in sore need of pressing...Dalton plays a straight-faced, humorless, no-nonsense Bond -- all guns and no play -- and it makes for a very dull time.

It's a movie that walks on air.

Lethal Weapon, that BMW of buddy movies, spawns Lethal Weapon 2, a blacktop-blistering bad-guy-getter that's nearly twice as much fun.

Weekend at Bernie's is an unfettered but uninspired one-joke movie.

A movie made by filmmaker working in sync with his times -- an exciting, disturbing, provocative film.

Although III claims seven times as much action as ever before, the movie is still so boring that even the love interest (Robyn Lively) leaves early. She's no Kung Fool.

Great Balls of Fire, like "La Bamba," is thin on the meaning of the life in question, but big on '50s Billboard nostalgia. It's lightweight archaeology, a bent American Bandstand biography. Something has slipped away from McBride, Quaid and Fields: the truth, the heart, the soul. All that's left is the hip.

The Batblast of the summer.

Director Joe Johnston, a veteran of Industrial Light and Magic, brings a wry Rube Goldberg approach to his first-ever feature. The sets are definitely plastic, but that slightly homemade look is refreshing in the hardware movie decade.