Whether the lines are funny, tasteless or not-so-funny, Chase keeps popping 'em; whether the scenes are from "48 HRS." or "Beverly Hills Cop," screenwriter Leon Capetanos keeps photocopying them; and director Michael Ritchie (who also directed "Fletch") makes everything move along to a frenetic zydeco soundtrack. Sooner or later, you'll find yourself laughing at something. Unless you're dead, too.

Because Cosmatos has put together a decent cast and a proficient crew, Leviathan is intermittently interesting, but it's a bad sign that the movie starts losing its punch when the monster shows up.

Terry Gilliam is the wit behind this lavish display of sieges, sea-creature tussles and trips to the moon. Adapting the handed-down stories of Baron Von Munchausen, an 18th-century spinner of tall tales, this modern maker of similar flights of fancy has created another brilliantly inventive epic of fantasy and satire.

As love interests go, Shepherd and Downey are about as hot as Ike and Mamie Eisenhower, though the apoplectic Downey does have his comedic moments. Always a standout, Masterson is pensively provocative as Miranda, something of a teen-age Kim Novak.

In Police Academy 6: City Under Siege, the humor (kind word, that one) vacillates between the soporific and the moronic.

You could call it a nightmare but that would be an insult to Elm Street.

Unfortunately, this isn't a role that requires an actor with Freeman's gifts -- in effect, his brilliance is irrelevant. The film is more a compilation of well-calculated cues than the presentation of a story, and all that the star is called on to do is hit his marks and prompt our responses. Avildsen, who sharpened his mastery of audience expectations on "Rocky" (which won him an Oscar) and the "Karate Kid" films, has a huckster's talent for keeping his audience on the line. This is not to take away from what Avildsen has done here. The movie is carefully and sometimes impressively laid out -- it's well "told." It's just that the skills he displays are not really those of a filmmaker -- or at least not one whose interest in his story goes beyond how to pitch it.

Watching it, you feel as if you're being hammered to death with champagne corks.

Leigh has fashioned a limber style of political commentary that is part documentary, part cartoon and wholly novel in the movies.

If the director, Stephen Herek, has any talent for comedy, it's not visible here.

The Mighty Quinn is a sunny Caribbean caper as giddily seductive as a great big umbrella drink. It's sly, wry and ocean-salty, a detective story with tropical punch.

True Believer is a thriller about moral rejuvenation, and there's not much wrong with it that another actor in the lead wouldn't cure.

Walas' animatronic Robo-Fly is as clumsy as both Stoltz's Martin and the film's script, which resorts all too often to clever computer graphics and video-flashbacks.

With his teddy bear appeal, it's not surprising that there was more magnetism between Selleck and the Baby in "Three Men" than there is between Selleck and grown-up babe Paulina Porizkova (though the two femmes fatales are similarly gifted). And it doesn't help that this high-paid clotheshorse is a chilly beauty whose presence is as spare as her figure. It's hard for Selleck to look deeply into those far-focused mannequin eyes.

Who's Harry Crumb? might have worked as a 20-minute skit, but the script and the direction are both sadly undernourished, which is certainly not the case with Candy. He remains a jovial character actor, but asking him to carry any film on those broad shoulders is a bit too much. The laughs are few and far between, even with Candy resorting to occasional disguises, and the humor has a depressing sense of de'ja` ha-ha.

Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects could be the worst Charles Bronson film ever, and that's saying something. If it were any slower, it would be running backward.

Parker, a director of breadth, not depth, never supplies the big answers, but he does powerfully depict the climate of the Confederacy in the "Freedom Summer" of 1964.

Francis Veber's Three Fugitives, a heist caper, starts off with comic promise then limps all the way from the bank.

Even with its collapse, Parents is remarkably accomplished for a first outing. It's good enough to make you wish desperately that it had hung together.

A slight skateboard thriller that looks more like one of those Afterschool Specials on television than a bona fide feature film.

Well shot, well edited, well paced, Deepstar Six seems to have gone to the idea-well just a bit too often -- or is that not often enough? While the creature is an average creation, the underwater visual effects are often quite good, if not plentiful enough. [14 Jan 1989]

Moonstruck writer John Patrick Shanley and Irish director Pat O'Connor are absolutely out of their league, a couple of artists slumming, hoping to bring sensitivity to a genre that could well use it. But all they've done is make you appreciate the true value of the car chase.

A subplot involving Griffith and first boyfriend Alec Baldwin becomes the-subplot-that-wouldn't-go-bust, and comic scenes sometimes go bankrupt because they just hold their stock too long. Light entertainment like this should zip along like those financial quote boards.

The effects are generally good, and those Cenobites are definitely not the kind of folks you'd have over on New Year's Eve. Still, it's odd that the most intriguing, and threatening, items in the film are those darn puzzle boxes.

Talk Radio, despite its collective intensity, is itself just another unenlightening late-night call-in session.

Whatever its failings, Beaches speaks to women. It makes girlfriends think of calling girlfriends they haven't seen in 10, 20, 30 years. You can live without love, but "you've got to have friends," as Midler sings.

It's Hoffman's failure, though, that sinks the picture. He is working here with his usual meticulousness, but there's no relaxation in his performance, no sense that he has ever merged with his subject, that he has found Raymond's center and is simply acting out of it.

Malkovich's lead performance digs in its heels, deadening the movie's speedy exhilaration. The result is a highly diverting but ultimately unsatisfying production that doesn't perform -- so much as paraphrase -- the script.