Screen Tests

For those who have forgotten what made us think Dan Aykroyd was so good in the first place, I advise seeing Michael Ritchie's hectic The Couch Trip—but bring aspirin. As a wise, witty, and life-embracing lunatic (in the movies, aren't they all?) who escapes from the asylum to become a celebrity radio shrink, Aykroyd pulls out stops we haven't seen since his Saturday Night Live days. Unfortunately, much of the movie around him is a shambles. * Moonstruck is about the unfathomable wonderfulness of love, but there's a livelier premise underneath that one: Norman Jewison's film imagines the whole world as Italian, and then recruits actors who are Armenian (Cher), Greek (Olympia Dukakis), and Russian (Feodor Chaliapin) to inhale pasta and get all misty over La Boheme. It works. The John Patrick Shanley script sometimes swells into preciousness, and so does Nicolas Cage as Cher's saturnine lover, but the delirium is mostly contagious. • At twenty-one, Kiefer Sutherland (below) has made seven movies, and he's brought a cunning, mercurial presence to all of them. Whatever else he has should be clearer this month, when he stars in both Promised Land and Bright Lights, Big City.

STEPHEN SCHIFF