Edward Guthmann

It's a witty, intelligent scramble, and it's beautifully mounted.

Conveys the character of this tiny, insular community through richness of detail.

A compelling, sympathetic portrait.

What sounded like an embarrassing blunder -- the romantic pairing of Richard Gere and Jodie Foster -- turns out to be surprisingly entertaining and persuasive.

I'm not quite sure what David Cronenberg is trying to say in Crash, but whatever it is, he deserves a lot of credit for having the nerve to put it on screen and face the consequences.

It's rare that we have a screen character as well-rounded, as recognizably human or as brilliantly played as Sonny Dewey.

Death Becomes Her may be crude and tasteless, but it's also irresistibly funny and very well played by Streep, Hawn and Willis -- each of whom suffered career disappointments of late, and each of whom shines in a role that casts them against type. [31 July 1992, p.D1]

A wonderful, cockeyed sex comedy.

If they weren't so funny and real, and if Linklater hadn't done such a good job in writing their dialogue and casting them, their lack of ambition might seem depressing, and the movie might come off as some smug hymn to negativity. [9 Aug. 1991, p.F3]

It's beautiful to look at, but it's stiffly acted by some of the performers and tends to get ponderous.

An absorbing look at emotional tyranny, with a great screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Today, Blade Runner works better than ever: Scott's version not only has more dramatic integrity, but its visual aesthetic and futuristic vision are more in sync with today's movie-goers. [11 Sept 1992]

Rising Sun doesn't work all that well as a thriller: it's far more successful in its old cop/young cop character study, and in its examination of cross-cultural tensions. [30 July 1993, p.C1]

Surprisingly, Potter takes what seemed like a recipe for embarrassment and excess and delivers a film that's sweet and understated and devoid of diva posturing.

[Raimi]'s drawn lovely, complex performances from Paxton and Thornton and proven that he can work effectively -- and movingly -- in a minor emotional key.

Joyously unhinged and outrageously inventive.

A goofy genre-buster that takes its amateur criminals as seriously as ``Pulp Fiction'' or ``Run Lola Run'' did theirs.

One of the most impressive actor-to-filmmaker transitions in recent years.

Graham Greene ("Dances With Wolves") in one of the year's best performances, he's a fully dimensional character: pathetic and shrewd, tragic and bitterly funny.

A marvelous film.

Heartfelt and passionate and brave in what it attempts to explore.

Great pleasures.

Apart from Lawrence's goofing, Blue Streak isn't much of a movie.

The result is startling and repellent -- a challenge to filmgoers accustomed to fake gunfire, fake wounds and cosmeticized death.

For music fans, there's great pleasure in hearing new audio tracks to "Sitting Here in Limbo," "Friend of the Devil" and more songs -- each one complete and unedited.

There's tremendous maturity and skill in Felicia's Journey but also a sense of impending horror that's bound to repel some audience members -- even though the violence is all implied.

For all its flaws and vagueness, Safe is smart, challenging and provocative -- a film that gives you plenty to chew on, long after Carol's sad tale has wound down.

Hollywood warhorse Norman Taurog directed Elvis eight times and had a knack for dragging decent performances from the boy. [03 Aug 1997, p.34]

Concubine demonstrates that Chinese films are growing by leaps and bounds in their technical sophistication, but also reveals how much they borrow from the energy and style of American cinema. [29 Oct 1993, p.C1]

It's that dilemma -- a commitment to Orthodox life, the refusal to deny one's sexuality and the fear of expulsion once that sexuality is revealed -- that director Sandi Simcha DuBowski illustrates so powerfully.

They're great, every one of them, but the real joy of Little Voice is Horrocks: her impeccable evocation of a timid soul and that eerie voice that sounds so surprising coming out of her.

It's smart and good-hearted and boasts an amazingly good score, but the film is limited by the very private nature of the man it portrays.

Not only celebrates Deren's cinematic legacy but also reveals a gifted talent whose explosive temperament was at odds with the lyrical, dreamlike imagery she put on screen.

Meticulously crafted, and warmly acted by a cast that includes Winona Ryder as Jo and Susan Sarandon as her mother, the devoted Marmee, Little Women is one of the rare Hollywood studio films that invites your attention, slowly and elegantly, rather than propelling your interest with effects and easy manipulation.

Irma Vep blurs the line between reality and fantasy, toys with notions of identity and offers a playfully jaundiced look at the petty jealousies and acts of sabotage that infect film crews in the heat of production.

Bound to be talked about, debated and eviscerated far more than it's understood.

Stettner approaches this material with a playwright's incisiveness and structural sense. His dialogue is cutting, often surprising.

Succeeds despite that mismatch of artist and material.

Delicious but complex.

An eye-opening documentary.

Segues confidently from broad humor to tense drama.

Is Poison Ivy a total waste of time? Not really: there's a nice surprise in Barrymore's femme fatale performance, and more than a few pleasures from the gifted Sara Gilbert. Long may they act. [30 May 1992, p.C3]

Beneath all that baloney and bombast, there's a lovely, inspiring story in Lorenzo's Oil. [15 Jan 1993, p.C1]

Directed by Andrew Bergman, a sometime playwright (''Social Security'') and film maker of modest talent (''The Freshman''), ''Honeymoon in Vegas'' is lightweight, palatable stuff -- the kind of instantly forgettable romantic comedy that Hollywood made in the '60s with Jack Lemmon or Tony Curtis. [28 Aug 1992, p.C1]

Dopey but rather sweet. [30 July 1993, p.C1]

Film is often too subtle and languorous for its own purposes: At times, it's close to soporific.

Larger Than Life isn't as bad as it sounds, mostly because Murray is so likable and fundamentally incapable of not being funny.

Grease isn't a four-star musical. It's fluffy and unimportant, and it gets tedious toward the end with the car-racing sequence that Kleiser staged in the paved-in-concrete Los Angeles River. The friskiness of the performers, the choreography by Patricia Birch and most of all Travolta's phenomenal charm give it its value.

Harron validates and largely clarifies the work.

Wildly ambitious, unwieldy epic.

Haneke directs Benny's Video in a cool, dispassionate style that matches the austerity of his subject, but keeps us at a distinct remove. And even though he introduces a faintly optimistic note in the film's last moments -- a hint at possible redemption -- his film is mostly a grim, downbeat experience. [01 Apr 1994, p.C3]

A superficial diversion.

Murphy is wonderful -- I wouldn't begrudge him an Oscar nomination -- but The Nutty Professor is a mess.

Sweet and harmless -- a beach movie in more ways than one -- but it doesn't run awfully deep.

A glossy miscalculation.

The wolf-homosexual analogy is well drawn, but Wolves ultimately feels slight, a tad unfinished -- as if it were conceived as a sketch and hadn't been fleshed out to feature length.

Ultimately, Regarding Henry has its heart in the right place, but is far too reluctant to share it with us. [10 July 1991, p.E1]

Talky, emphatically unsteamy psychological drama.

If John Waters had directed Mermaids, the new Cher comedy, it might have more of the spunk and the trash that it needs. In the hands of middlebrow director Richard Benjamin, it starts off promisingly but finally sinks into schmaltz and melodrama. [14 Dec 1990, p.E1]

The movie isn't particularly well-paced, and I found it dull. But I've got to give credit to Todd Masters, who designed the special-effects makeup, to Gilbert Adler, who directed the Crypt Keeper sequences, and to Zane, who plays the Collector with style and wit. If I were 12, I might've loved it.

It's like watching a bad update of an Antonioni film.

The story doesn't quite pay off, characters are underwritten and the surprise ending is contrived and unconvincing.

Granted, you don't expect much from a movie like this: azure seas and honey-dripped sunsets, perhaps, a little titillation and a few wicked laughs. But Robert Steadman's photography lacks the imagination of Almendros' work on The Blue Lagoon, and the rare erotic moments are no match for the dumbness of Leslie Stevens' script. [03 Aug 1991, p.C3]

Slick, overly deliberate and brimming with hammy performances...directed by Rob Reiner with glistening, uninspired competence. [11 Dec 1992]

Ultimately there's something too measured, too controlled in his film.

Directed by first-time film maker C.M. Talkington, Love & a .45 is a low-rent variation on Natural Born Killers -- ragged, raunchy, a bit bratty but not altogether worthless.

Sentiment, the kind bordering on schmaltz and easy tears, is found in Shower, a well-meaning generational drama.

One Fine Day is no great shakes, but it avoids being tiresome thanks to the attractiveness of the stars and to a few twists that screenwriters Terrell Seltzer and Ellen Simon offer to differentiate this from other bickering-adversaries-fall-in-love comedies. Both stars also have adorable kids who figure prominently in the plot.

It's an honest portrayal, but it leaves the audience stranded, without the emotional hook of a character we can care about.

Surprisingly tepid and soapy.

This is pleasant, safe entertainment that ought to appeal to kids younger than 10, especially to girls, with its female-empowerment fantasy.

Jingle wants to warm our hearts and establish Schwarzenegger as a family man -- but devotes so much time to goony violence and broad physical comedy that the last-reel schmaltz feels hollow and tacked-on.

In Hollywood, where integrity is rapidly consumed and careers defined by market value, there's trash and there's trash with a pedigree.

Little Buddha is ambitious, sincere and squeaky clean -- a dose of spiritual eyewash that skims the surface of the Buddhist religion and leaves us wishing for more. [25 May 1994, p.E3]

Melodramatic take on love and war.

It's beautifully shot by first-time feature director Antoine Fuqua, whose eye for sensual surfaces, deft camera moves and elegant framing was refined with commercials and music videos

Exuding glamour, health and prosperity, real-life spouses Beatty and Bening are so radiant that they run the risk of seeming superhuman and thereby losing our sympathy as screen characters.

Pure of intention and passably diverting, His Secret Life is light, innocuous and unremarkable.

The Brady Bunch Movie is fairly innocuous, and ought to satisfy the twenty- and thirtysomethings who grew up on the sitcom. Just one problem: It may be unsporting to point this out, but the whole notion of holding up the Bradys as the ultimate cultural icon of the '70s is basically a lie.

A provocative, upsetting film.

Even the surprise ending arrives with a thud and makes us wonder why Shyamalan didn't try something new instead of recycling his "Sixth Sense" recipe.

A domestic melodrama with weak dialogue and biopic cliches.

I just wish that "Apollo 13" worked better as a movie, and that Howard's threshold for corn, mush and twinkly sentiment weren't so darn wide.

As haunted-house thrillers go, Cold Creek Manor is more ludicrous than the average but at the same time more handsomely produced.

It's not a bad film, but Towne and his star, the charismatic Billy Crudup, never fire the imagination in the way their inspirational, respectful biopic is obviously intended to.

It's hard to give two hoots about any of these characters.

Sexual curiosity is a very dangerous thing in Rain, a dazzling mood piece from New Zealand filmmaker Christine Jeffs.

It sets up two or three dozen satirical targets, hits the mark occasionally, but has trouble maintaining an even satirical tone or satisfying pace. Dawber, too, is unappealing in the female lead -- definitely outclassed by Ritter. I'd wager Stay Tuned will die an early death at the box office and find its real life, appropriately enough, in home video. [15 Aug 1992, p.C3]

Has a weirdly divided structure that alternates Irwin's nature segments with clumsy dramatic footage set in the CIA.

Impeccably mounted, nicely scored and beautifully written.

Mother is a relationship comedy, like Woody Allen's films, and it screams for the smart, elastic pacing that Allen creates. The situations are funny -- 40- year-old John moves into his old bedroom, goes shopping with Mother, is shocked that she has a boyfriend and occasionally curses and smokes -- but his poor timing flattens most of those scenes.

It's a light-hearted comedy about faith, transcendence and American-brand exploitation, and addresses those issues in such goofy, indirect, unhurried fashion that you could easily miss what Schrader has to say.

The movie, directed and written by Gregory Nava ("My Family/Mi Familia"), is only so-so but Lopez, who appeared recently in "Jack'' and "Blood and Wine," is so vibrant that you almost forgive the movie's paint-by-numbers script and moldy formula.

Too bad the plotting is jumbled, and the characters too numerous and undifferentiated.

Neutralizes these characters, makes them cute and one-dimensional like fluffy dolls.

Basketball Diaries is an earnest, botched effort to do justice to Carroll's book. Amazingly, though, even with Kalvert's lack of style and vision, the greatness of DiCaprio's performance is undiminished.

The film has a good heart, but its central premise -- that ignorance is an enchanted realm -- is too sentimental.

It makes you wonder when Araki is going to find something else to think about.