Edward Guthmann

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.