Special Coverage Pop Culture Classics (The EW 1000)Sound BitesSummer TVBox Office Game

In Theaters Angels In The Outfield See Review in Kids Section on page 66.

Baby's Day Out (PG) Unaware that he is being pursued by a trio of bumbling kidnappers, cute, gurgly Baby Bink explores Chicago, crawling fearlessly on his little Osh-Koshed knees. Writer-producer John Hughes, who has milked the children-as-charmers genre so successfully in his Home Alone movies, shamelessly regurgitates the formula here, with results about as fresh as a soggy diaper. C+ ( 231, July 15) -LS

Blown Away (R) Don't waste your time taking the muddled Northern Irish politics of this pumped-up tick-tocker seriously. What matters in this wildly unfocused but energetic action thriller is whether Boston Bomb Squad big shot Jeff Bridges can defuse faster than Irish prison escapee Tommy Lee Jones can destroy. Jones, frolicking in a private carnival of motivations, is a builder of fancifully constructed devices of destruction. Comparisons with Speed are inevitable; think of this as the clumsier, more sentimental one. C+ (230, July 8) -LS

FORREST GUMP (PG-13) As Forrest Gump, a sweet-souled innocent with an IQ of 75, Tom Hanks lowers his voice by an octave and speaks in a courtly Dixie accent. He looks and sounds like a very proper young boy on his first day of kindergarten. Yet despite (or because of) his trusting, man- child nature, Forrest ends up playing a pivotal role in just about every key moment of American cultural history since the early '60s. For a while, Forrest Gump has a what's-next? quality that's impishly entertaining. By the time Forrest goes to Vietnam, though, the movie implies that its hero, rather than living through history, is triumphing over history, like a slow-brained Ferris Bueller. He's making the last 30 years feel good again. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Forrest Gump is a technically amazing pop stunt, yet it reduces the past few decades to a kind of virtual-reality theme park: a baby- boomer version of Disney's America. C ( 231, July 15) -OG

I Love Trouble (PG) Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts play competing Chicago newspaperpersons who face danger and the possibilities of romantic entanglement on the trail of a hot story. You wish there were more snap, wit, and chemistry, particularly in a story inspired by the sophisticated romantic comedies of the '40s. C ( 230, July 8 -LS

THE LION KING (G) The Disney animators return to the primal-pop emotionalism of Bambi. Simba, the cuddly lion prince, is taken under the wing of his father, the regally imposing Mufasa. Then Mufasa is killed, leaving Simba alone, a lost adolescent in search of his place in the natural kingdom. The musical numbers are tepid, but they're a minor flaw in this rapturous piece of storybook mythmaking. As Scar, Simba's murderous uncle, Jeremy Irons gives a genuine performance, filling the character with elegantly witty self-loathing. A- (228/229, June 24/July 1) -OG

MI VIDA LOCA (R) The new movie from writer-director Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging) is an act of perverse defiance, a tale of teenage Latina gang girls in L.A.'s Echo Park that seems calculated to be as aimless and scrappy as its strutting homegirl heroines. From its perky opening frames, the movie is infatuated with the iconography of inner-city Hispanic youth: the tattoos and hairnets, the girls in shellacked lipstick calling each other ''Bitch!'' Yet apart from these vibrant neighborhood trappings, Mi Vida Loca is shapeless and inert, its dramatic fragments breaking off into further fragments. C- ( 232, July 22) -OG

THE SHADOW (PG-13) Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin), tuxedo-clad playboy, slips in and out of his tormented alter ego, the Shadow. Trying to turn the old radio serial into a cross between Batman and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the movie vaporizes it into a glittery trash pile. D ( 230, July 8) -OG

SPEED (R) In Los Angeles, a psycho (Dennis Hopper) attaches a bomb to the bottom of a public bus. If the bus dips below 50 miles an hour, the bomb will go off. The slyest joke of the movie is the way the image of Jack Traven, the fearless, go-getter hero, plays off Keanu Reeves' blank-generation stupor. A ( 227, June 17) -OG

TRUE LIES (R) James Cameron directed this high-powered pop cocktail, which combines the far-fetched acrobatic nihilism of a James Bond film with the screwball charm of Romancing the Stone. Superagent Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is married to a prim legal secretary (Jamie Lee Curtis) who thinks he's an overworked computer salesman. The film doesn't really find its groove until Curtis gets into the action. Her middle-American feistiness sparks Schwarzenegger, who gazes at her with such avid affection that when he reaches down from a speeding helicopter to grab her hand, it's the bond between them-and not just the thriller logistics-that makes the scene crackle. The climax, with Schwarzenegger maneuvering a Harrier jet like a giant, hovering bumper car, is genuinely spectacular. B+ ( 232, July 22) -OG

WOLF (R) Will Randall (Jack Nicholson), a weary Manhattan book editor, is bitten by a wolf. The early scenes are executed with satirical panache. But when Wolf becomes a conventional horror thriller, it turns stuffy and blah. B- ( 228/ 229, June 24/July 1) -OG


Posted Jul 29, 1994 | Published in issue #233 Jul 29, 1994 | Order Article Reprints