Hal Lipper

It's witty, wise, nasty and frothy. But it's also frantically paced, leaving its cast and the audience in its wake as it plows forward. [31 May 1991, p.6]

10 Cloverfield Lane superbly shuffles what we know (and don't) and what the characters are experiencing.

If you let it, Damage can be an exhilarating and a devastating leap into the realm of erotic obsession. [22 Jan 1993, p.8]

This movie is one of the biggest surprises of the new year: a tense suspense thriller, with darkly comic elements, that celebrates American excess while ridiculing it. [09 Mar 1990, p.23]

Cool yet engrossing story of Merrill's fall from grace for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. [15 Mar 1991, p.7]

Bob Roberts is the meanest, most outrageous movie to come out of the emasculated American left in a decade. It's a triumphant satire. [25 Sep 1992, p.9]

Lethal Weapon is harder-edged than Beverly Hills Cop. It never forgets that it's a detective story, an action-adventure with a dash of cheer. Its climax can stop pacemakers at mid-beat. Trash rarely has been this much fun. [06 Mar 1987, p.1D]

How much you enjoy Presumed Innocent depends on whether you read Scott Turow's exhilarating legal thriller about a prosecutor charged with murdering a colleague who was briefly his lover. If you haven't, director Alan J. Pakula's adaptation will leave you dazzled and drained long before the final twist. If you have, you'll appreciate Pakula's faithful, though overly restrained, approach to Turow's 1987 novel that sold 1-million hardback copies and spent 44 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. [27 July 1990, p.6]

One of the finest pictures released this year. [13 Nov 1987, p.1D]

Lethal Weapon 2, which is based on a story by Warren Murphy and series' originator Shane Black, is nearly as good as the original. It has its flaws. The story too closely parallels the original, a Golden Triangle conspiracy that had more mercenaries running around Los Angeles than the Third World. [08 July 1989, p.1D]

Predator has a certain comic-book quality that, combined with its parody of movies like The Magnificent Seven, is very appealing. It provides the action, suspense and technical wizardry that summertime audiences crave. [12 June 1987, p.1D]

Running on Empty, for all its implausibilities and pseudo-radical bourgeois banter, is an unusually engaging movie. [14 Oct 1988, p.10]

Stone's riveting three-hour movie freely mixes black and white and color documentary footage with pseudo-documentary and dramatic footage, so the line between real and fabrication is constantly blurred. [20 Dec 1991, p.7]

Gibson and Glover never have been more at ease. Their camaraderie and complementing comic styles grow increasingly engaging. There's too little of peroxide-dipped, gold earring-plated Pesci, who takes Lethal Weapon 3 to a higher comic plane whenever he's present. [15 May 1992, p.5]

Distant Voices, Still Lives is both a personal and social portrait. It often flows without dialogue, eloquently relating a tragic story that words could not describe. [10 Nov 1989, p.13]

Encino Man is enormously funny, hip and gross without ever being vulgar. [22 May 1992, p.12]

Bertrand Tavernier's 'Round Midnight is a superlative elegy, a bluesy, melancholy movie dedicated to expatriate jazzmen Bud Powell and Lester Young. It captures the essence of their music, moving with the smokey, meandering rhythms of bebop. [03 Feb 1987, p.3D]

The Last of the Mohicans is grand entertainment. Romantic, exciting, though unremittingly violent at times, it is rich in frontier lore and in its respect for the land that the conquering settlers too often take for granted. [25 Sep 1992, p.5]

While Husbands and Wives is mired in mid-life, Singles is buoyed by the exhilaration of young people experiencing the initial freedom of adulthood. The concerns are similar. But the outlook of each generation couldn't be more different. [18 Sept 1992, p.5]

Beauty and the Beast flows effortlessly, its images sweeping past with unprecedented fluidity. [22 Nov 1991, p.6]

It's a feather-light fantasy bouyed by faith, hope and good will. [15 Dec 1989, p.12]

The Commitments is a noisy, gritty, foul-mouthed movie with strong Irish sentiments and accents as pungent as stout. [13 Sep 1991, p.20]

Levinson's Bugsy is painted against a vast tableau as sprawling as his Avalon and Rain Man. Bugsy is his most sophisticated film to date, a celebration of an outlaw's scheme to turn sand into gold; not for profit, but for love of a woman called Flamingo. [20 Dec 1991, p.24]

Aladdin is a treat for adults, as much as it is for children, because the big blue Genie of the lamp is none other than Robin Williams. [25 Nov 1992, p.7B]

These are minor quibbles with a stunning achievement. For All Mankind rewrites history, creating a single glorious adventure from a generation of giant leaps for all mankind. [20 July 1990, p.7]

The Package has its shortcomings - notably its disjointed beginning and some implausible miscalculations by the conspirators toward the end - but it generally hums at a healthy clip with twinges of Big Brother paranoia. [25 Aug 1989, p.12]

The particular genius of My Life As a Dog is its ability to capture the joy, fear and fantasy that make pre-adolescence so beguiling. [18 Sept 1987, p.3D]

Above the Law is action trash. But it's great action trash, running fast and furious from the first frame to the last. It's entirely possible - in fact, advisable - to forget the movie's right-to-left-wing political swings and just watch Seagal rage. [22 Apr 1988, p.7]