The dialogue reports funny things instead of showing them. The movie remains in a limbo halfway between the informed anarchy of Monty Python comedy stripped of all social and political satire, and the comparatively genteel comedy of "The Lavender Hill Mob." [15 July 1988, p.C8]

Weightless. It is also, unfortunately, without much point at all... A movie of random effects and little accumulative impact.

Meant to be funny, but it only swells the sinus passages. It is a painfully inept comedy.

Conan the Barbarian is an extremely long, frequently incoherent, ineptly staged adventure-fantasy set in a prehistoric past.

Though the body count is high, all of the people killed are faceless or only minor characters, until the end. It's as if the movie were saying that lethal violence is acceptable (and fun) as long as the victims - like the victims of guided missiles and high-altitude bombing - remain anonymous. Any comedy that allows the mind to ponder high-altitude bombing is in deep trouble.

The film tries to cover too much ground, even though Calder Willingham's script eliminates or telescopes events and characters from the Berger novel.

The Dead Pool, possesses a couple of good jokes, but nothing can disguise the fact that it's a mini-movie in the company of a mythic figure.

In Twins, which is supposed to be funny, the former Mr. Universe and pint-sized Danny DeVito play twins, the result of a genetic experiment that went awry. To the extent that Twins is carried by anybody, it is carried by Mr. DeVito. Mr. Schwarzenegger is dead weight. [9 Dec 1988, p.C18]

The film, which opens today at the Sutton and other theaters, is composed of a prologue, written for the movie, plus four separate stories, each of them either based directly on a script from the television series or suggested by one. A lot of money and several lives might have been saved if the producers had just rereleased the original programs.

A Chorus Line is less a movie than an expensive souvenir program.

The screenplay is priceless (funny) and it's Mr. Reeve who sets the film's tone. Unfortunately, his unshadowed good looks, granite profile, bright naivete and eagerness to please - the qualities that made him such an ideal Superman - look absurd here.

Kafka is opaque without ever being mysterious, frightening or suggestive of anything but movie making. Its chases through dark narrow streets don't create suspense, since nothing is at stake.

It's full of film knowledge and is amazingly elaborate for a low-budget movie. The only problem is that it's not funny. One smiles at the inspiration of the jokes, though not at their execution.

Nothing that Mr. Clayton does with the actors or with the camera comes close to catching the spirit of Fitzgerald's impatient brilliance. The film transforms "Gatsby" into a period love story that seems to take itself as solemnly as "Romeo and Juliet."

Return of the Jedi oesn't really end the trilogy as much as it brings it to a dead stop. The film...is by far the dimmest adventure of the lot.

It is spectacularly out of touch, a laughably earnest attempt to impose heroic attitudes on some nice, small characters purloined from a ''young-adult'' novel by S.E. Hinton, the woman who wrote the novel on which ''Tex'' was based.

Cocktail, which opens today at the Cinema 2 and other theaters, is ''Saturday Night Fever'' without John Travolta, the Bee-Gees and dancing. It is an inane romantic drama that only a very young, very naive bartender could love. How it got that way is difficult to understand.

Harlem Nights is not the disaster some people might have been expecting. Mr. Murphy has appeared in far worse films written and directed by people much more experienced.

It's not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be. Its 134 minutes induce a state of simulated brain death, an effect as easily attained in half the time by staring at the blinking lights on a Christmas tree.

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is the most barren comedy I've seen in years, maybe ever.