If the movie had any pace or energy, or even if the music were something other than tepid covers of songs, most of which were written before anybody in the cast was in rompers, then it might have been fun just to watch the actors strut around sexily onstage, living the rock life. But the thing just lies there. [15 Feb 1988, p.D4]

Ironweed is decent fare, not excellent. It gets by on the strength of the unexpected.

By many other directors' standards, Au Revoir would be a major achievement. But Malle has reached higher. If he'd made his childhood movie earlier in his career -- when he didn't have the sense to be so dispassionate -- it might have packed a meatier punch. Now it's just a deftly aimed poke.

Actually, Spottiswoode's film has its moments.

Take a powerful, revealing nonfiction book, sift through it for its most cliche'd elements and turn it into a terror film and you've got The Serpent and the Rainbow.

In Milan Kundera's novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the characters are pawns on a complex, philosophical chessboard with Kundera's didactic commentary accompanying every move. In his adaptation, director Phil Kaufman films the pawns, even many of the moves. But without Kundera's connecting presence and voice, the result is closer to Chinese checkers than chess...Very attractive and watchable checkers, sure

In general, if it weren't for the good will we feel toward the actors, the movie would be intolerably feeble. It's nearly intolerable as it is. The only other plus is Stewart Copeland's jaunty, percussive score. It's this sort of thing that's giving maternity a bad name.

Though much of "Candy" is a clumsy sprawl, there's more than enough human spirit in the tank to keep it going.

William Shakespeare would need a sense of humor to view Jean-Luc Godard's "King Lear" without getting steamed up in his bodkins.

What you end up with in Good Morning, Vietnam is a peculiar hybrid -- a Robin Williams concert movie welded clumsily onto the plot from an old Danny Kaye picture. And neither half works.

Like too many genre directors these days, Ken Wiederhorn went for a mix of horror and comedy, and it's probably not his fault he succeeded mostly with the latter.

It's all as cliche'd as "A Summer Place," a better movie even if it was soap opera. For Keeps is a soapbox opera, and the slats are about to fall through. Writers Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue are as wishy-washy about their issues as they are their heroes. And they serve up the usual "you can have it all" scenario. After the teen-agers suffer with didies and postpartum depression, it's off to college to prepare for future careers. [16 Jan 1988, p.B5]

A great big beautiful valentine of a movie, an intoxicating romantic comedy set beneath the biggest, brightest Christmas moon you ever saw. It's a monster moon, a Moby Dick of a moon, whose radiance fills the winter sky and every cranny of this joyous love story.

Pu Yi's personal tragedy has become Bertolucci's three-hour epic of obsolescence, opulently visualized. It's docudrama that dazzles, but basically Pu Yi was a bore.

Batteries is a strange kids' movie, a queer mix of violence and otherworldly benevolence. It might have been a good idea, a story of the vanishing urban neighborhood and gentrification by tycoon. But half-pint aliens to the rescue? It's time E.T. went home.

As it turns out, big secrets aren't revealed in Broadcast News, but the film is so ingratiatingly high-spirited, and the performances so full of sass and vigor, that in the long run it doesn't really matter much.

If there's an amnesia movie worse than Overboard, it slips my mind.

Douglas plays Gekko with a terrible intensity. He raves and rants, but he has a rascal's humor.

Better yet, just throw the whole thing in front of a subway and hope it gets dragged a couple of miles.

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

To completely sabotage the work, there is an insipid affair between Manon and a young teacher, Bernard (Hippolyte Girardot). Their juvenile romance blunts the epic effect that Berri obviously is trying to create.

There are many periods when the two men are traveling and you feel the need to fast-forward the movie to another scene. This is not a great comedy but it's a string of funny highlights.

Director Leonard Nimoy does not use his ears for comedy -- nor his eyes, even. His three leads recite their lines as though they wanted to take their jumbo-sized salaries and run -- which, given this movie, maybe isn't such a dumb idea.

Teen Wolf Too is nothing a jar of Nair wouldn't cure.

Flowers in the Attic is slow, stiff, stupid and senseless, a film utterly lacking in motivation, development and nuance, and further marred by embarrassingly flat acting and directing.

The film as a whole is a little like one of those inflatable love dolls -- a reasonable facsimile, but nothing like the real thing.

You want to know if The Running Man is a good-time macho show, right? Stay at home and watch professional wrestling. Or Miami Vice (same director -- Paul Michael Glaser). Sure there's blood spattering and bullets riddling and Big Boys Banging Biceps. But through the dry-ice haze, Running Man is surprisingly boring.

Attenborough's aims are more academic and political than dramatic. By following an initially wrongheaded white character, he clearly wants to reach out to similar audiences. Cry could have reached further.