Edward Guthmann

Floats along on the strength of its writing and supporting cast.

Smothers whatever merits it may have had in a rush of bells, whistles, bombast and smoke.

Stylized dialogue tends to play awkwardly onscreen -- we're conditioned to naturalistic conversation in films -- and Waters, who makes his feature directing debut with The House of Yes, fails to create an emotional tone or attitude to match the characters' goofy repartee.

A charming, finely nuanced romance.

Placing style above coherence, Seven glosses over plot points and shows a weakness for cheap, lurid effects.

It's downbeat material and it tends to drag a bit, but Jia's performance is so unsparing and intense -- and the film so compassionate and chaste in its approach to a life lost and recovered -- that Quitting ultimately satisfies.

A movie so cheeky, aggressive and bursting with vitality that it can't help being annoying and exhilarating at the same time.

Ultimately, Chechik can't pull off the fractured-fairy-tale aspect of Benny and Joon. His film never explains mental illness, but romanticizes it, making it seem like a state of enchantment. It's ultimately irresponsible, and not very funny. [16 Apr 1993, p.C1]

A movie by a man who adores film and relishes its potential.

Lacks insight and finesse, and feels like a boldfaced Rorschach for Smith's own hang-ups.

Three hours of overstatement and schmaltz.

Addams Family Values is so much better than the first film -- partly because Sonnenfeld, who made his directing debut with the first film, has refined his directing chops, but mostly because Rudnick has contributed a delightful, mock- macabre script. [19 Nov 1993, p.C1]

Could use more background and personal detail on Rijker, but Bankowsky's tight, no- frills approach is always compelling.

(Holm) nails one of the best roles of his career.

All told, the best ensemble cast I've seen this year.

Entertaining.

Handsome and sincere but slightly awkward in its combination of entertainment and evangelical boosterism.

A pleasant but conventional film.

A menage a trois tale that aspires to the breezy screwball comedies of the 1930s -- but more often resembles a hip soap opera.

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

Consenting Adults is well-made, preposterous junk -- the kind of modestly effective thriller that delivers a modicum of thrills but insults its audience, over and over, to achieve that effect. [16 Oct 1992, p.C1]

So quick that the flat moments are rapidly, inevitably chased by a new gag.

A serious weakness for corn isn't Marshall's only problem. She's got a gift for comedy and she brings out the best in many actors, but she's juggling too many elements here -- baseball, a huge cast, a 1940s milieu -- and never finds a consistently satisfying tone or rhythm. [1 July 1992, p.E1]

It's an horrific and tragic story, but somehow made beautiful through the care and attention of Schnabel's direction and Bardem's tender, unforgettable performance.

This is Rampling's film, and she's never less than surprising, never less than a revelation.

Instead of defining and spoofing its period, its attitude and its social barometer, Leave It to Beaver just stumbles about in a bland, irony-deprived suburbia that denies the movie any juice or bite and renders the Cleaver family even duller than it was.

It starts out with several seemingly separate stories and characters, allows them to tease, overlap and shade one another, and then weaves them into one rich fabric. It's an allegory about American life -- a tough, cynical meditation on race, crime and the futility of human endeavor.

Schrader seems to understand these characters implicitly, and the result is probably the best film he has directed.

Spartacus isn't the greatest epic ever made, but it's head and shoulders above most of the sword-and-sandal wheezers that came out in the '50s and '60s. And, given the prohibitive costs of shooting an epic today, it's the kind of movie we're not likely to see anymore -- except in well-deserved revivals like this one. [13 May 1991, p.E1]

It's hard to follow, the characters are ill-defined, and the wide-angle shots used by Wong's perennial cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, are deliberately unflattering.

Pryce is very good, but Very Annie Mary is a bit too eager to please.

Manages to be affectionate without drawing too deeply from a well of sugar and schmaltz.

The movie was written by Scott Yagemann, who taught seven years in the Los Angeles public- school system, and you can feel the rancor and bitterness he still carries.

Light and innocuous.

Loose, buoyant and bracingly original.

None of the advance hype on Kids can prepare you for the raw, stripped-down reality that Larry Clark captures in his astonishing first film. Nothing can prepare you, because no other film has ever caught the recklessness, sweat and tingly heat of teenage sexuality so effectively.

Boyle isn't the first British or European filmmaker to make his obligatory zesty American road movie (apparently it's a dream for anyone raised on American cinema), but knowing that doesn't make A Life Less Ordinary any less tiring or its numerous pilferings any less obvious or annoying.

Harmless enough, and its team of actors so frisky and enthusiastic that it manages to deliver a modicum of laughs despite itself.

At its best, Forrest Gump is a gentle, elegiac fantasy about love and trust.

Unfortunately, Raising Cain is largely a retread of De Palma's vintage thrillers from the '70s -- an extended self-homage that makes you wonder if his imagination got frozen in 1980.

A study in unexpressed emotion, but Mamet turns the flame so low that his film lacks the emotional payoff we expect.

That's a few too many agendas for one film.

Unlike other recent films noirs -- ''The Grifters,'' for example, or ''After Dark, My Sweet,'' both of which were based on Thompson stories -- One False Move lacks style and wit, and doesn't explore its characters beyond their cheap, cruddy exteriors. [24 June 1992, p.E1]

The animation is rich and densely detailed, the characters well defined.

It's a sad sight when two big- name stars sink this low, especially when their demoralization and embarrassment are right up on the screen. [24 Aug 1991, p.C3]

Night and the City is basically a mess, but De Niro, calling up his reserves of manic energy, is entertaining in the title role. He's foolproof, really: He even shines in mediocrity. It's a shame his talent didn't rub off on Jessica Lange. Playing Helen, a tough-broad barkeep who joins Harry in his biggest scam yet, the overly mannered Lange gives her worst screen performance to date. [23 Oct 1992, p.C1]

The Neon Bible is a lovely, rewarding film, but it requires some work and some faith on the part of the viewer. Davies' rhythms and camera moves are as slow and stately as ever -- the antithesis of most Hollywood films -- and the moments of crystallized emotion he achieves are sometimes separated by dull patches and self-conscious artiness.

In a movie as hackneyed and as dull as Evolution, the small favors of Duchovny's performance stand out.

It's a wise, sweet-natured film, and one that manages to have fun with its charac ters without judgment or condescension. [04 Aug 1993, p.E1]

A delicate, beautifully observed study of impossible romance, Lost in Translation is one of the best films this year.

Jay and Claire are exquisitely played by Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox.

Plummer gives her strangest, most uninhibited screen performance to date. Playing Eunice, a wildly psychotic killer with a working-class British accent and a mysterious past, Plummer draws a streak of white-hot rage across the screen.

Strange Days wants to say something about faith and redemption -- about the importance of maintaining one's humanity in a darkened world. That's a worthy intent, but Bigelow is so enamored of high-tech thrills, and so mesmerized by the violence she seeks to condemn, that her efforts at 11th-hour moralizing seem limp and halfhearted.

Sick does a remarkable thing in presenting extreme, sometimes revolting material and simultaneously making us like and admire Flanagan.

It becomes stronger and more honest than most character studies on film.

Forget Beautiful Girls. The title ought to be "Jerky, Messed- Up Dudes With Nowhere to Go"

A schlocky thriller that might appeal to less discriminating members of the mall crowd.

Exhilarating not only for its dreamlike images and fierce, frequently reckless imagination but also for the fact that it got made (and released) at all.

It sounds promising, but it doesn't work. You get the feeling that Soderbergh, so early in his directing career, has exceeded his reach -- that the com- plicated logistics of making a film on location in eastern Europe, compounded with the challenge of bringing to life such a fundamentally lonely and passive figure, had stymied him. [17 Jan. 1992, p.D1]

Days of Heaven is a visual poem. Slow and elegant, reverential in the way it celebrates the earth's contours and the play of light. [27 Oct. 1999, p.B3]

His (Seidl) camera is shocking in its intimacy, his film surprisingly casual in its depiction of extreme behavior and the randomness of violence.

By far Elvis' best post-Army flick, and you can thank Ann-Margret for that distinction. [03 Aug 1997, p.34]

A conspiracy tale of high-tech chicanery, Chain Reaction has better acting, better writing, more spectacular chase sequences and more genuine drama than all of this summer's blockbusters. It's also got Morgan Freeman, as good an actor as we have today, which easily qualifies it as the one action film you should see this summer if you see no other.

The dialogue, heavy on sarcasm and puncturing insults, never captures the World War II period but sounds ridiculously anachronistic.

The photography is strong, the performances sympathetic and the sex plentiful.

A first-rate historical drama.

Hollywood hit-making at its efficient, formulaic worst.

Numbing.

Sci-fi has rarely been so playful.

It rambles, it's repetitive, but once in a while there's a sparkling moment when someone speaks in a way that conjures the fierce passion of the '60s.

Edge of Seventeen is sweet and affectionate, but it also has "first effort" stamped all over it. Director David Moreton never made a feature before this, and has yet to learn how to compose a shot or block his actors.

Sexy and passably entertaining, with a plot that's too clever by half.

A mean-spirited comedy...that steals the rampaging-psycho-chick formula from ``Fatal Attraction'' and tries to make it funny.

Holds our attention by dispensing information gradually, like a piece of fiction.

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.

What Daylight lacks is the knowledge of its own limitations. The only really hysterical line is delivered by Sly's son, Sage Stallone, who plays one of three young prisoners also stuck in the tunnel...Surrounded by rubble and rising water, he gazes longingly at the 14-year-old Harris and says, "If we don't die in here, I was wondering if I could give you a call. . . ."

Wonderfully original comedy.

Remarkable also for the uniform excellence of its cast, and for the pleasure [Altman's] actors take in the wide berth he allows them. [24 Apr 1992]

One of the year's sweetest surprises. It sneaks up on you, disarming you with its modesty and tenderness, its remarkable lack of self-infatuation.

A glob of comedy, drama, action and suspense.

A buoyant, picaresque farce that hums with goofy energy and mines enough ideas, jokes and setups for three movies of this description.

The only way to enjoy Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy is to savor the performances and behavior quirks, and release the notion that plot is essential.

Nobody's Fool functions mostly as a character study, but it's also Benton's elegy to America's endangered small towns. It's a gem.

Barbarella is a pure goof -- Vadim called it a kind of sexual Alice in Wonderland of the future -- and Fonda seems to have reveled in every sexy, campy moment.

An earnest, ponderous epic that tries desperately to say Something Important about disenfranchised blacks and their Afrikaans oppressors, but never does. [27 March 1992, p.D7]

Leigh doesn't sentimentalize these tragic, dead-end lives but allows his characters to be ugly and stupid, to make horrendous mistakes. Sometimes they're laughable, and yet there's never the sense that Leigh is mocking them.

Captures the effervescence and playfulness of Johnson's novel, even as it attempts to shoehorn a tangle of characters and situations.

That's why American Movie cuts so deep: It's about the American dream, about not giving up, about being true to yourself.

A handsome film, filled with lavish costumes and set designs and told in a series of exquisitely composed images. But even with its visual polish, it's a chilly, largely unaffecting film about an unsympathetic man.

Apart from its cast, however, Gas Food Lodging doesn't have a lot to recommend it. This is true: It's earnest, the milieu it establishes feels authentic, and the three actresses work hard at giving their characters a life...But Anders' inexperience at writing and directing shows. She overloads her film with too many subplots, and consequently loses whatever steam she manages to build up. She introduces too many secondary characters -- two suitors for Nora, one ex-husband, and two boyfriends apiece for each daughter -- but never develops any of them adequately. [9 Sept 1992, p.E3]

A powerful allegory.

A melodramatic yarn that transcends some of its technical and storytelling flaws through the cheery energy and sincerity of its cast.

Fernanda Montenegro gives a landmark performance.

The aftertaste of that father-son scene is so strong, so disturbing, that the riches of Happiness -- its writing, its performances, its trenchant wit -- all seem a bit diminished in the bargain.

Gorgeous and optimistic.

It's a classy but downbeat spin on the most familiar of TV-movie formulas.

Nossiter's premise is good, and he intrigues us with stylish conceits, but he makes a crucial casting error. Alec ought to be someone we care about.

Cheerfully raunchy and undeserving of its prohibitive NC-17 rating, Orgazmo is a harmless sex farce.