Less Than Zero, an aptly titled tale of snooty California drug snorters, is dumber and duller than primordial ooze. It's one of those silly speed-bumps-in-the-fast-lane laments, though it does have a significant message: Get off the freeway or take the last exit ramp to the Betty Ford Clinic in the sky.

Visually bland, well-meaning salute to the brotherhood of man.

The trouble is, since few characters are fully developed, it's hard to care who's doing what to whom and why.

This is a rare kind of pulp; it's boisterously destructive, funny and, at the same time, almost serene.

Carpenter being Carpenter, he vacillates between overexplanation -- his are the most verbose horror films -- and cheap shocks.

A low-horsepower chase movie with Charlie Sheen and D.B. Sweeney...Peter Werner, with plenty of documentaries and "Moonlighting" episodes to his credit, directs this out-of-gas look at the young and the mobile. What this movie needs is more macho, more moxie, more attitude. Fill it up, and make it high testosterone.

Suspect doesn't provide even the most basic pleasure that we've come to expect from thrillers -- it's doesn't get our pulse racing. For most of it, we're stuck in what must be the ugliest courtroom in the history of movies, and after a while, it becomes a drag on your spirits.

A highly watchable slice-of-low-life entertainment. If this isn't her best role, it's Dunaway's gutsiest.

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II may be derivative, but for the most part it's clever enough to trade on its sources with humor and class. It's "Peggy Sue Lives on Elm Street," with dollops of "Carrie," "The Exorcist" and a half dozen other genre stalwarts.

The wacky incongruity works when debuting director Mamet has tongue in cheek. But all too often he's rechewing film noir, Hitchcock twists and MacGuffins, as well as the Freudian mumbo-jumbo already masticated tasteless by so many cine-kids.

What with these pictorial pollutants, he loses sight of plot. "Someone" suffers somewhat from Scott's blind spot, but it's still a reasonably enjoyable romantic thriller with "Platoon's" Tom Berenger on his best behavior.

Baby Boom is an '80s fable based on a beer ad philosophy.

It has extravagant, bloody thrills plus something else -- something that comes close to genuine emotion.

The screen writers have come up with a simple-minded scenario, true, but it is enlivened with enough laughs to make up for the shortcomings.

This is a gassy, overbearing, pretentious little bit of art-in-your face, from the director of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," and it revisits some of the filmmaker's favorite places (the men's room, for example) and favorite themes (life as consumption and elimination). Most of the film's meanings are buried inside the artist's big, intellectually high-rolling metaphors.

A percolating comedy. The laughs may not tear your belly up, but they're constant and they dovetail with the story.

Add Big Town's collection of spotty characters (with motives murkier than the cinematography), cliche'-laden dialogue (from We gotta get out of here to I can change, I can change), abruptly ended scenes, no exposition when you need it, poor sense of drama (a deep breath), and you have something that should be pitched out into the alley behind the dingiest bar in town.

Maurice succeeds because [Merchant/Ivory's] trademark flatness is appropriate for the subject.

Fatal Attraction rings the changes on your atavistic emotions. Walking out of the theater, you might have a sudden desire to club a woolly mammoth and hide your family in a dark cave -- away from people like Glenn Close.

Hellraiser is certainly a cut or two above the slasher films that seem to proliferate on Friday the 13ths and Halloweens. It's a decidedly adult picture, with some disquieting sexual tensions that simply wouldn't work with the usual teen crew. It's also a treatise on the thin line between pleasure and pain and how easily crossed it can be.

The movie's ending is overly sentimental -- something I never thought I'd see in a Toback movie. What it delivers is a message about commitment -- and it's pretty much of a crock. You don't feel that Toback's heart is in it either, especially as an explanation for Jack's behavior. It's too pat a resolution.

Despite the Sybil-like plot (and questionable Rambo mentality), there's something watchable about it all. Weird it is, flop it ain't.

An absorbing, intelligent and suspense-filled film... It's streamlined and rich at the same time -- like the best of the James Bond films, but serious.

Had the filmmakers resisted the temptation to politicize their material they might have made a great war movie. They might also have thought to give us some indication of the strategic significance of the hill. As it is, they've managed to create a deeply affecting, highly accomplished film.

Riddled with labor rhetoric, this coal-dusted tragedy wavers between well-acted propaganda and historical burlesque. Rambo's reactionism seems almost subtle by contrast.

Genre aficionados looking for chills and thrills will be disappointed; this one could play uncut on television -- network, not cable. The effects and the jokes are equally few and far between, and for all its amiable intentions, House II deserves few boarders.

Beneath the sylvan trappings is a whodunit as riveting as any.

Unfortunately, the idea for Dirty Dancing exceeds the execution...and the story resolves itself all too conveniently in that final scene.