Edward Guthmann

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

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

Sweet and insubstantial -- just like the French Christmas cake for which it's named.

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.

One can admire it, but it's hard to get caught up in it.

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

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

A breezy, occasionally funny spoof.

In one sense it's aged surprisingly little -- the language and physical gestures of camp are largely the same -- but in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that's a good thing.

Crooklyn is loud and raucous and occasionally cruel. The actors shout their dialogue, the kids trade insults and the movie has the strained, desperate-for-fun anxiety of a TV sitcom. [13 May 1994, p.C1]

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

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.

[Harris's] craft is shaky, and the actors she's assembled, with the exception of Johnson and Ebony Jerido as Chantel's best friend, are one step above Amateur Hour. Just Another Girl looks and feels like a first-time effort. [02 Apr 1993, p.C5]

This is a smart film, told in a minor key, that augurs well for Whaley's directing career.

You can see the outcome from a distance, but Michael Lehmann ("Heathers") directs with such snap, and the actors play their concert of comic duets and trios with such skill and charm, that The Truth About Cats & Dogs emerges a surprising, first-rate romantic comedy.

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.

Harron validates and largely clarifies the work.

It's hokey, implausible and packed with red herrings, and yet it's a lot of fun.

Rich with statistics and snazzy visuals, but it ignores those larger questions and, as a result, feels a tad naïve.

Wildly ambitious, unwieldy epic.

Spielberg uses a more conventional format than he did in the stripped-down black-and-white "Schindler's List,'' and delivers a film that veers between stoic political correctness and mushy pop-Hollywood platitudes.

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

Naked Gun 33 1/3 is a feast of pointless, shamelessly silly, almost consistently funny gags. Another comic gem. [18 Mar 1994, p.C1]

A thrilling, audacious work.

The film underscores the paradox in this man's life: the split between the mild-mannered New Yorker and the fearless vagabond who joined an Arakmbut hunting raid.

Greenwald is fine at creating the texture of early mountain life but loses her footing by embracing several plot points at once.

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.

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.

A sweet, unabashedly sentimental tale.

Enormously satisfying and fun to watch.

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]

A tale of yuppie conformity and domestic angst that quickly turns into a horror film.

Walks a sometimes-shaky line between tenderness and schmaltz.

It's a distinctly French feeling -- an air of caprice and light expectations -- and a perfect prologue to a delightful film.

Demonstrates, if nothing else, that there's a genuine person -- chastened by mistakes and more compassionate, perhaps, for all she's suffered -- beneath the war paint and the stardust.

Arizona Dream is an inspired, erratic goulash that ignores standard movie- making formulas.

Dead Man plays a lot of cards at the same time, and Jarmusch occasionally loses his rhythm when he allows his actors their improvisational riffs.

Polanski attempts a precarious mixture of drama and comedy here -- seesawing between a serious look at sexual obsession on the one hand and an antic, spoofy tone on the other. It's a bold risk, but it rarely works because we usually don't know if Polanski is being intentionally funny, or merely inept. [25 Mar 1994, p.C3]

Pure ham and cheese.

For all the deadpan laughs it delivers, Careful is too self-conscious, too stoned on its own invention and technique to merit sustained attention. It's a marvelous conceit, but ultimately a thin one. [08 Oct 1993, p.C3]

Entertaining.

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

Impeccably mounted, nicely scored and beautifully written.

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

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.

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.

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]

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

A clever look at con artists and their games of deception.

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 domestic melodrama with weak dialogue and biopic cliches.

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

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]

Beneath the handsome production values, the steady motor of Ron Howard's direction and the solid acting of Mel Gibson as a flashy airline tycoon whose son is abducted in Central Park, Ransom is pure poison: the kind of hang-'em-high rouser that feeds off our basest impulses and prods us into cheering the hero on as he commits grisly, retributive acts of violence.

Three hours of overstatement and schmaltz.

Segues confidently from broad humor to tense drama.

A showcase for Wang's greatest strengths as a film maker: a chance to explore friendships, connections and random serendipities.

The Portrait of a Lady is a huge disappointment. It's a deliberately arty, overly formal exercise in emotional terrorism.

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

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

The result is a sprightly, entertaining film, but one in which the satire is neutralized for laughs.

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.

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.

Wong Foo is pure fantasy and sets up the cross-dressers as avenging spirits of fun, frolic and frisky style. Like samurai cleans ing a village of its criminal scum, they transform Snydersville from a drab, dusty whistle stop to a wonderland of wigs, sidewalk cafes and spontaneous dance parties.

A charming, finely nuanced romance.

Self-satisfied -- an undisciplined brat of a film.

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

We're left with a metallic aftertaste.

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]

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

Myers and Carvey bring a lot of goofy, adolescent charm to the party, but not enough to save an idea that's grown stale. [10 Dec 1993, p.C3]

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

Does about as good a job of simulating that terror as it possibly could, but it's no competition for what we create in our mind's eye while reading.

Sarandon and Portman work beautifully -- together, negotiating a range of emotional keys that blend comedy and drama in the same moment.

It's a glamorous revenge romp, a "9 to 5" mixed with "Auntie Mame," and it gives each star the opportunity to do her best work in a long, long time.

Places Myers firmly on the top rung of movie comics.

Lushly entertaining, and its subjects are terrific storytellers with style to burn.

In his thrilling feature debut, Madame Sata, Brazilian filmmaker Karim Ainouz doesn't glorify dos Santos but examines the hot, reckless fever of his life in all its thorny complexity.

The beauty of Morris' achievement is the way he fuses Hawking's work in theoretical physics with his subject's life history -- finding subtle connections between the two, and avoiding the pat, predictable structure of biographical film. [28 Aug 1992, p.C3]

A downbeat but oddly affectionate tale.

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.

Doesn't sanitize its tale of African American loss and survival -- the way Steven Spielberg's “The Color Purple'' did -- but delves deeply, heartbreakingly into an American tragedy.

Nelson's work is relentless, grueling and courageous. He makes a large blunder in having American actors (David Arquette, Steve Buscemi) play Hungarian Jews with American accents, while Harvey Keitel plays a Nazi officer with a German accent.

Told so simply and powerfully that it seems to carry echoes of earlier, timeless tales.

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

The schmaltz is relentless in The Legend of 1900, the newest film from "Cinema Paradiso'' director Giuseppe Tornatore. It comes in waves, it leeches onto every surface and it turns decent actors into sticky-sweet fuzzballs.

An unabashed soft- core sex marathon, much of it played for laughs, Sex and Zen could catch on as a voyeur's delight -- an Asian spin on the jiggle- and-hump comedies of sex-satirist Russ Meyer (''Beyond the Valley of the Dolls'').

The Indian in the Cupboard is such a sweet film, and so lacking in the bloodthirstiness and violence that parents dread in children's films, that its mere existence seems worthy of praise. Too bad, then, that it turned out so dull and lifeless.

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]

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]

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.

Largely and insider's joke.

A handsome, entertaining twist on the King Arthur legend.

A listless, predictable effort, occasionally redeemed by witty lines and charismatic performers.

Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty draw everything in simplistic, overstated terms. The good guys are pure and spunky, the bad guys bellicose and one-dimensional, the conflicts stripped of nuance.

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.

Too ludicrous to be taken seriously, but not entertaining enough to rate as camp.

Ultimately, it's a cold, caustic film that doesn't take a strong point of view but seems to offer up its numerous set pieces.