Hal Hinson

Here, Lyne indulges more in misdirection than in direction; he's a magician turning a sleazy trick. But even his technical skill breaks down. The picture is garbled and cliched.

The picture amounts to little more than an uninspired, almost perfunctory exercise in "big game" manipulations.

A nonstop moronathon... Bio-Dome offers a pants-load of poop and masturbation jokes, deviant innuendo and simian sight gags destined to gross out and offend just about everyone.

Fresh is an electrifying, sobering movie, and with it, Yakin announces himself as perhaps the most gifted newcomer of the decade.

A case study in how Hollywood can make a complete mess out of what was previously a marvelous film.

3 Ninjas, Touchstone Pictures' latest attempt to fill the idle summer hours of our nation's youth, is a Frankenstein of a movie, an unhappy creature stitched together out of the body parts of other movies. And though it's not a horror film, it is a genuinely scary experience, if only because it actually seems to make time stand dead still.

To director Scott and screenwriter Roselyne Bosch, the atrocities against the natives came about not as a product of evil but through Columbus's ineptitude as a political leader. Still, this failure -- and his frustration over never actually reaching mainland America -- renders him a tragic figure. Though he was the dreamer and pioneer who first set foot in the New World and brought treasures and territory to Spain, he died all but forgotten. The movie, alas, for all its wondrous beauty, is destined to suffer a similar fate.

The movie is shot as if Bigelow wanted to take her audience to the very edge of sensory overload. Her pulsing, super-psychedelic images are edgy and invasive. They burn as they hit your retina. After a while, however, Bigelow's careening camera, the heavy-metal music and the flash cutting begin to make you feel hammered and abused. Though the movie is jammed with plot, nothing seems to happen. [13 Oct 1995, p.F01]

Tony Scott's Revenge is fascinating for one reason only -- as an example of full-scale, mega-star perversity. The star, in this case, is Kevin Costner, and there's a willfulness in the extremes to which he's gone here to alienate his public. Costner pitches his performance at his audience like a dare, as if he were seeing how far out on a limb it's willing to climb with him.

As the years flash by, Mr. Holland ultimately discovers that he has given the world something much more valuable than a symphony; he has touched thousands of lives with the gift of music . . . blah, blah, blah. It almost makes you wanna hurl.

Director Frank Oz has brought a devilish tang to the machinations here, and the actors bring a sense of a spoiled grandeur to their characters' mingy souls.

Writer-director David O. Russell's exhilarating follow-up to "Spanking the Monkey," is even wilder, giddier and more unpredictable than that irreverent debut.

Ferrara is clearly drawing an equation between the criminals' actions and The Lieutenant's, and as trite (and potentially shameless) as this may sound, it actually works.

As a celebration of ephemera, the movie is a mixed bag, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tiresome.

The "Godfather" films transcended their mobster genre; New Jack City doesn't, but it's a great genre film, edgy, vibrant and full of urgent color.

An animated feature with political agenda -- a didactic cartoon. But that doesn't interfere with its being a whopping good time.

At its worst, River's Edge is crackpot sociology. Jimenez and Hunter use the characters' lack of affect as an indictment. The film has a hectoring, hysterical tone. It wants to find out why these kids, who have grown up in splintered, lower-middle-class homes, are like they are. They want to blame somebody.

Usually, Ephron is one of the most reliable comic voices in the movies, but here her gifts seem to have deserted her. Though she shows her customary talent for smart one-liners, the spirit of the film is forced and desperate, as if she lacked faith in her gags and were trying to shove them down our throats.

Ultimately, La Scorta is a tight, competent but rather inconsequential thriller. It's diverting, but thin. (Review of Original Release)

Riotous adaptation of Alan Bennett's comedy about monarchal frailty.

Watching Claire Denis' Chocolat, you feel as if your senses have been quickened, reawakened. The movie is like sex for the eyes -- it's ravishing in a way that goes straight into your blood.

A jazz piece may be improvised, sketched out in the process of creation, but a movie resists that kind of spontaneity -- or requires skills that are beyond Lee's talents at the moment.

Because of the square, lackluster way that director Michael Gottleib has staged his material, the whole production seems sort of limp and perfunctory.

Big has a warmhearted sweetness that's invigorating; it makes you want to break out the Legos. It's only near the end of the film, when Hanks has to play the scenes for pathos, that the movie becomes cloying.

Rourke is, in fact, exceedingly creepy. There's an unpredictable, resonant menace in his eccentricity. But Cimino can't connect the movie's thriller elements to its themes. We end up spending way too much time indoors while this thug waves a gun at these poor innocents.

Coarse and haphazardly engineered and never more than intermittently funny.

Linklater's control seems all but invisible here. But this kind of stylistic lucidity can only be the result of determined calculation and planning. The kind of happy accidents he captures don't come about by accident.

By the end, the film’s early promise has pretty much degenerated into routine pyrotechnics.