Harper Barnes

A generally absorbing, sometimes harrowing look at the violent rise of twin brothers named Kray to the top of the London underworld. [09 Nov 1990, p.3F]

Texasville is much less memorable than The Last Picture Show, but it is well worth seeing, particularly if you loved the original movie and are curious about what happened to the people in it. There are some slow spots, but not too many. And there are more laughs than tears, although, as country music fans know, it is often hard to tell the difference. [28 Oct 1990, p.6C]

The best thing about Renegades is a beautifully choreographed car chase early in the movie. After that, the movie creeps along for 20 minutes or so while the two principals grope toward buddyhood. Then, with bonding accomplished, the action picks up somewhat, but never really catches fire. [07 Jun 1989, p.3E]

CRAZY PEOPLE is a one-joke movie. It's a pretty good joke: Slightly unbalanced people write ads that tell the absolute truth about products, and the products sell like crazy. But it isn't good enough to make us care for long about a mental-institution romance between Dudley Moore and Daryl Hannah that has the feel of ''David and Lisa: The Sit-Com.'' [13 Apr 1990, p.3F]

Hearts and Souls is an only intermittently entertaining reworking of an ancient Hollywood formula. [13 Aug 1993, p.5F]

On a scale of 1 ("Men in Tights") to 10 ("Naked Gun"), I'd give "Fatal Instinct" about a 5. [31 Oct 1993, p.9C]

Prince is a puzzle. Unfortunately, in Graffiti Bridge, he isn't a very interesting one. The main problem may be that most of the music in this sequel to Prince's 1984 musical Purple Rain is mediocre, mainly derived from rap and funk but without the energy those forms generate when they are presented raw. [06 Nov 1990, p.4D]

ROMEO Is Bleeding is an interesting mess. A very self-conscious contemporary take on the film noir genre, it is so dark (both photographically and psychologically) and derivative that at times it seems like a parody. [2 March 1994, p.6F]

THIS odd, anachronistic movie is the story of a couple of white guys (Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas) messing around in 19th-century Africa, and a couple of lions who want to eat them. I kept rooting for the lions. The Ghost and The Darkness is not a bad movie, and the scenes with the lions are fearsome. But it is so old-fashioned in its view of British Colonial Africa that you keep expecting Stewart Granger to wander in out of "King Solomon's Mines" (1950). [11 Oct 1996, p.3E]

Fitfully, someone will say or do something very funny, but much of the time passes in a rather laborious way. This movie should have been a lot better than it is. [27 Nov 1994, p.9C]

Despite a solid cast and a few interesting visual moments, Surviving the Game is just a routine action picture. [21 Apr 1994, p.5G]

This convoluted tale of a U.S. Treasury agent (Wesley Snipes) looking for the rats who killed one of his partners simmers along fairly well for about 45 minutes and then gets all lukewarm and fuzzy. [21 Apr 1993, p.6F]

Twenty or 25 minutes of good air-action sequences, otherwise dull. [17 Jun 1990, p.7F]

The problem with In Praise of Love is not that it seems to be possessed by a kind of free floating anti-Americanism. I'm not all that crazy about some of the things this country does, either, and I detest some of the big-budget movies Hollywood makes. The problem with In Praise of Love is that it never shuts up. [1 Nov 2002, p.E4]

This amiable, poky one-joke movie - Bill Murray is saddled with an elephant - gets brief jolts of comic energy when Matthew McConaughey shows up as a manic truck driver. Otherwise, it's got a few laughs, and could use a few more. [02 Nov 1996, p.51]

The Glimmer Man starts out like Seven, but pretty soon it dwindles into nothing. [09 Oct 1996, p.5D]

Candy breaks out of his goofball mold and delivers a solid performance as a lonely Chicago cop who can't pull loose from his domineering mother. The major flaw in Only the Lonely is that the mother (Maureen O'Hara) is such a vicious, whining, manipulative bigot that it is hard to care about her when the inevitable turnabout comes, or see why Candy doesn't just pull out his service revolver and blow her away. [24 May 1991, p.3F]

The elements never quite combine into a cohesive compound, and a lot of the dialogue - particularly Calamity Jane's - might have worked on the page, or even on the stage, but has a phony theatricality when uttered by people with cameras in their faces. [01 Dec 1995, p.3E]

This time, the results are only fair. [13 Jan 1989, p.5G]

Rookie of year strikes out in the laughs department. [09 Jul 1993, p.3D]

PRESUMABLY this zombie flick is supposed to be funny, since it's about as scary as "Little Women." [18 Jan 1995, p.6F]

A turgid, overlong comedy. [19 July 1996, p.3E]

Reeves seems less blissed out than conked out, as if he had sustained a heavy blow from a loose surfboard. [27 May 1994, p.3H]

In this year's stupid sexy screamer, Sliver, [Stone] tries to reveal some of her character's mind. But there's nothing in there but cotton candy and foggy images from old soap operas. [23 May 1993, p.12C]

This droll, leisurely paced movie might alternately be titled "The Only Good Man in Africa." [09 Sep 1994, p.3F]

The overt sexuality of Madonna's stage show, particularly the lengthy exercise in self-stimulation called Like a Virgin, as well as the sometimes startling bluntness of her talk, keeps the movie from being totally boring. But this kind of trash can only sustain itself for so long - for most of us, about as long as it takes to get through the line at a supermarket. [17 May 1991, p.3F]

The movie is going to make a lot of people mad, too - the ones who liked the book. If you missed Tom Wolfe's scathingly satirical best seller about the greedy society of the 1980s, you will probably find yourself bored by the tepid, badly miscast screen version. You may leave the theater a little confused as to why there was so much controversy during the filming of what turns out to be a silly, almost innocuous Hollywood farce. [21 Dec 1990, p.3F]

A FEW mildly erotic soft-core sex scenes separated by long stretches of very pretentious, bad dialogue and some travelogue shots of Carnival in Rio: That's about it for Wild Orchid. [25 May 1990, p.6F]