Edward Guthmann

The Thing Called Love should have been a nice, middle-key romance, with a few gentle digs at Nashville's fevered, wildly competitive country-music scene. Instead, it's a hapless, well-intentioned mess -- running in half a dozen directions at once, looking half-planned and semi-improvised, and featuring a skittish, overly mannered performance by Phoenix. [16 March 1994, p.E1]

In concept alone, Ravenous is anything but appetizing, but in execution it's worse than you'd imagine.

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.

An arid, uninvolving film that suffers from Burrows' miscasting as the vain Julie.

Disappointing, pointless and repetitive.

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.

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.

The great thing about Reality Bites is that each of the characters comes across as real, and not some glib concoction by a screenwriter who's watched them from a cloistered distance. Childress obviously knows their world inside out, and shares it with insight and a prickly, original wit. [18 Feb 1994, p.C1]

If Party Girl weren't so contrived, and if Posey didn't exude such cold hauteur, all of that might have worked.

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.

By playing the boob so brilliantly, Atkinson allows us the catharsis of recognizing our own incompetencies and lack of poise.

Succeeds despite that mismatch of artist and material.

In its sober, nonassertive way, Bopha! takes on the tone and weight of a Greek tragedy. [24 Sept 1993, p.C1]

Delicious but complex.

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

Sinks into melodrama.

An eye-opening documentary.

Leigh goes right to the core of his character's lives and mines the place where we're weakest, most alone and sometimes the cruelest.

Has there ever been a live concert film as vibrant or as brilliantly realized? I don't think so. [Review of re-release]

Downbeat, ultimately tragic, but there's a wondrous, sad beauty here.

Splendid.

Feels so moldy and out of date.