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By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW

Bad Influence (R)
Rob Lowe makes his bid to enter the Kink Hall of Fame in a satisfyingly nasty thriller from director Curtis Hanson. The booby-trapped storyline orbits around the perverse, teasingly fraternal, and finally destructive bond between Lowe's psychopathic charmer and yuppie marketing analyst James Spader. B+

Blue Steel (R)
After a promising opening, Kathryn Bigelow's police drama devolves into a revisionist psycho-thriller, a patchwork genre movie. Jamie Lee Curtis plays a rookie cop stalked by a messianic nut case (Ron Silver). Though slow and portentous, the film has a fever-dream clarity that makes one eager to see what Bigelow could do with a good script. B-

Joe Versus the Volcano (PG)
Screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (''Moonstruck'') makes his directorial debut with an embarrassingly precious neo-Walter Mitty fable that never gets off the ground. A nebbish, Tom Hanks, learns he has only six months to live and throws caution to the wind. His big adventure has all the show-stopping whammy of a ''Love Boat'' rerun. F

Lord of the Flies (R)
Director Harry Hook's lush, Americanized update of William Golding's 1954 classic novel is a surprising success -- a big improvement on Peter Brook's 1963 black-and-white rendition. Although the symbolism is still too literary for the screen, the story, rendered in a swift-yet-luxurious hyperrealist camera style, retains much of its fairy-tale power. B+

Nuns on the Run (PG-13)
Robbie Coltrane and former Monty Pythonite Eric Idle don habits in a cleverly directed comedy about two London gangsters hiding out in a convent. While Idle hits notes of daffy, near-subliminal sarcasm, Coltrane steals the movie as the lapsed Catholic who knows the refuge's middle-aged nuns all too well; he's the biggest, baddest altar boy ever. B

Posted Mar 23, 1990 | Published in issue #6 Mar 23, 1990 | Order Article Reprints