Despite its occasional sparkle, Invaders From Mars is an overlong movie with a tiny spirit. It plays to a certain smug superiority of an audience nurtured on junky television, and while that smugness is in some ways justified -- movies like the original "Invaders From Mars" had their obvious failings -- it's also, over the course of a feature film, more than a little annoying. The original "Invaders From Mars" did something this spoof never even comes close to -- it scared the heck out of you. That's something Hooper might try accomplishing, before he sets about sending it up.

If this guy tripped over a print of "Citizen Kane," he not only wouldn't know what it was, he'd hit somebody over the head with it. [24 May 1986, p.C1]

There are movies that make you want to mince words, and then there's Poltergeist II: The Other Side, a movie so ineffably bad, you can't even find the words to mince. [23 May 1986, p.D2]

Top Gun is basically "An Officer and a Gentleman" with less spirit and depth. But it's still fine formula movie-making -- like a feature-length "Be All That You Can Be" commercial. It's got lots of loud music, hot colors, heat-seeking missiles and other pointed objects. Real men squint into the radar's gleam below deck, while real men hunt MiGs upstairs. [16 May 1986, p.29]

In Short Circuit, there's nothing at stake, either emotionally or artistically or howsoever -- and I mean nothing -- but the movie's so diverting, and so giddily oblivious to its own faults, that it almost doesn't matter. Funny and paced at a gallop, it's a melt-away movie made for summer nights. [09 May 1986, p.D1]

If it is useful to know that a director knows absolutely nothing about filmmaking, from script to casting to editing to where to put the camera, then there is one useful thing to be had from Blue City. First-time director Michelle Manning has spun a yarn that is grotesquely implausible, less affecting than plausible, and less attractive than affecting -- Blue City seems to have been processed in mud, and even Godard at his most perverse couldn't have violated the rules of camera placement and framing more doggedly. [5 May 1986, p.B4]

The point is well taken, but, basically, Cradle is a long rapturous interlude of baby pictures, now and then reinforced with pointed pro-momma dialogue. Even with the politics, it remains just so much French Pablum. [09 May 1986, p.28]

The movie is one of those can't-miss projects that, uh, misses...Altogether, this is about the most listlessly paced thriller you could imagine: Ashby's penchant for letting his actors improvise just results in endless dithering; and the image is weirdly flat -- the movie's shot almost entirely in profile. Actually, there aren't just 8 million ways to die -- now we know there are 8 million and 1. [25 Apr 1986, p.D2]

MOST Americans are probably having a hard enough time trying to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys in Central America, and Oliver Stone's "Salvador" is careful not to help us take sides. Much to its credit, that's mainly what makes this political thriller so terrifying...It's not that there aren't any villains in this film -- based on the real-life account of photo-journalist Richard Boyle who co-wrote the screenplay with Stone -- but that there are so few good guys to turn to. [4 Apr 1986, p.29]

Legend may turn out to be legendary, but not in the way the filmmakers intended. As a flight of fancy, it has the balletic grace of the goony bird, crashing on takeoff and spending the next 90 minutes in a fluttering tizzy on the ground. [24 Apr 1986, p.D3]

What's left here is not so much a movie as an assault so unpleasant, it leaves you wondering what you could have done to deserve it. [27 May 1986, p.B3]

Wise Guys, a surprisingly sweet, but sluggish Mafia farce, teams easy-going Joe Piscopo with driven, dangerous Danny De Vito in a neo-Abbott and Costello Meet the Godfather.

My Beautiful Laundrette is quirky and fresh and ambitious and pretty much everything a movie should be, except good.

If amusing, A Room With a View is little more than a lark, a series of skits, a two-hour tribute to the rich British eccentric.

Lucas is about as likable as this kind of movie ever gets.At the heart of Lucas is an interesting idea -- a Woody Allen movie for kids, with a bespectacled, nerdy hero -- that never gets developed. Still, director David Seltzer has kept it low-key, sweet and personal -- it's like a nice "Afterschool Special."

A cut above the usual hack 'em up, and perhaps even a hack above the usual cut 'em up.

The Money Pit is Richard Benjamin's attempt to make a '30s comedy through the lens of Steven Spielberg -- there are contraptions and "smart" dialogue and, unfortunately, nothing to hold them together. [28 Mar 1986, p.D2]

Like the original "Care Bears Movie," Care Bears Movie II is nothing but an insidious feature-length toy commercial. But since Funshine Bear has taught me to look on the bright side, I will admit that the animation in the sequel is of a higher quality.

Howard entices us into overlooking the film's faults with some genuinely amusing scenes, particularly those featuring Japanese-American Gedde Watanabe as a beleaguered Assan executive who doesn't fit the corporate mold. [14 Mar 1986, p.27]

So when the movie turns out drab and predictable, it's depressing -- you think Hill has become a stranger to his own sensibility. [24 March 1986, p.C3]

The camera style is grotesquely overwrought, a relentless exercise in technique for technique's sake. It's all here, folks: fancy wipes, expressionistic angles, quick-cut close-ups, stylized backlighting, camera moving in endless illogic. It's as if a 15-minute history of film technique had been compiled by a psychotic. [19 Mar 1986, p.B9]

Given the low budget, there was no money for transitions or fancy wideshots, so the look is strangled, stranded and somehow like stagework. All the same, if you are a woman who loves women, you will no doubt love Desert Hearts. But it doesn't seem a good bet to cross over. [18 Apr 1986, p.27]

Trouble in Mind is something of a jumble, but never less than an intriguing one. It's an off-center romance, as unnerving as a half-remembered nightmare. [25 Apr 1986, p.D1]

The movie lacks luster, and that quintessentially adolescent passion that fueled "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." There's no punch to the pacing, and the players, though pleasant, are uninspired by Howard Deutch, who is directing his first feature film after doing videos, including one from Ringwald's second movie, "Sixteen Candles." The happy ending, changed to suit the tastes of preview audiences, steals the movie's potential pathos, and turns teen trauma into so much gooey, rose-colored mush. [28 Feb 1986, p.11]

Much of the problem lies with Howell, a dilute, rabbity actor in the Tim Hutton mold. Everyone acts Howell off the screen, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, who displays an easeful gruffness as the girl who joins Jim. With Howell's weightlessness, the deeper elements of the story -- the byplay between guilt and innocence, for example -- never accumulate.

Golan and Bruner, in other words, have made the Holocaust into just another tear-jerking tool for the Cannon Productions shlockenspiel. This is called "chutzpah." The unoffended will find that the movie doesn't even deliver on its own sordid level. There isn't any action till 70 minutes into the film.

According to the press kit, "Producer Daniel Melnick's personal stamp on films has always been to avoid the obvious, the cliche'." Uh, Dan . . . you lost your stamp.

I suppose there's not much point at this late date to complain about how all movies look and sound alike today, how dull stretches in the story are pumped up with loud music, how handy, so-called "comic" hooks (one character has a flatulence problem, another will do anything for sex, another will do anything for money) have taken the place of characterization, how directors don't even try anymore to create a real milieu. [15 Feb 1986, p.G6]