Hal Lipper

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]

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

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]

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

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]

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]

Yet the sting of truth and insight that Husbands and Wives provides is such a rarity in cinema, even in Allen's movies, that Husbands and Wives emerges a singular achievement, ranking among Allen's best. [18 Sept 1992, p.22]

Oliver Stone's Platoon is the most sobering Vietnam War epic ever made. It is an unqualified triumph for its honesty, its artistry, its brutality and its frank portrayal of a nation - our nation - divided by ideology, poverty, racism and drugs. [25 Jan 1987, p.1E]

A League of Their Own is a grand-slam comic drama. Superbly written, acted and directed. [1 July 1992, p.1D]

An absolute masterpiece in the Disney tradition. [17 Nov 1989, p.11]

Finally! An American adaptation of a French movie that works.

Enormously engaging. [7 June 1991, p.7]

Batman is perfect summertime fare. Its secret is levity hidden in a dark and troubled soul.. [23 June 1989, p.6]

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]

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]

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

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is one of the finest installments in the saga. [6 Dec. 1991, p.5]

Spielberg's Empire of the Sun dispels with the sugar coating that turned Alice Walker's searing novel about racial and sexual subjugation into "The Color Purple: The Coffee Table Edition." Yet, Spielberg retains a sense of innocence in this ambitious, visionary tale. [10 Dec 1987, p.6]

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

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]

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

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

A slam-bang terrorist thriller from first frame to last. It also is astonishingly conventional. You've seen the plot machinations up to the final showdown in a dark, secluded house in dozens of movies before, though rarely so well-orchestrated. [5 June 1992, p.5]

Radio had a mystical power that television never has been able to re-create. Its sound effects and faceless voices stirred the imagination and quite often the heart. Allen captures its essence with an anguished broadcast from the scene of an accident, an attempted rescue of a young girl wedged in a well shaft. [20 Feb 1987, p.1D]