Jay Carr

Like a good supermarket tabloid, Time Code grabs - and keeps - our attention.

The film will resonate with today's alienated workers, whose every brain cell and nerve ending hates the soul-crushing jobs they're told they should be grateful to have.

Engrossing and eye-opening in several respects and even, when you least expect it, humorous.

Goes soft in the end, but not ruinously so. Meanwhile, its loose cannons bounce off one another deliciously.

Cleverly mixing shamelessness and panache, Wes Craven's New Nightmare is easily the most dazzlingly self-referential seventh installment in a horror series ever. [14 Oct 1994, p.60]

''The Silence of the Lambs'' was a classic; Hannibal is only a good movie of its type.

The best thing about Together, apart from the way some of its characters grow on you even as others put you off, is the way it snatches idealism back from the brink of life-smothering orthodoxy.

There's a grim fatalism in Les Voleurs, with more than a few pangs of resignation and a melancholy respect for the problematic nature of life. But it's also bold and powerful and totally unpredictable as it draws its narrative strands together to conclude that the human heart can be the biggest thief of all. [17 Jan 1997, p.D5]

Of course, the comedy is Manhattan-neurotic, but the film's tone is playful and its mood is comfortable. This movie may not stay with you a long time after you leave the theater, but you'll enjoy it a lot while you're watching it. [20 Aug 1993, p.41]

Although there's nominally a lot of action, the film doesn't exactly abound in narrative pulse. But its portraits and textures take up a lot of the slack. [16 Aug 1996, p.D5]

Until Exotica gets away from Egoyan at the end, it's his strongest bid yet to integrate strong feelings and sleek visuals. [03 Mar 1995, p.33]

It's a charmer.

It turns the nerve-fraying Cuban missile crisis into a big pop myth with the grip of a vise.

A deft, elegant, melancholy tapestry of flawed outreach, and the big reason it succeeds is Podeswa's courage in dispensing with a lot of exposition and trusting the audience - and the faces of the actors - to fill a lot of what otherwise would be gaps.

A seductively corrosive horror story that also potently suggests the ways war can shatter childhood.

Begins with that invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz. But its chic indictment of empty materialist values fizzles.

The sterling and reliable Strathairn brings stoic dignity to the husband's role, young Mazzello takes advantage of the chance to show more here than he did in Jurassic Park and Curtis Hanson's direction is expeditious and unpretentious. But River Wild is a Streeporama, and Streep at the flood tide is something to see. [20 Sep 1994, p.61]

Fast-moving, light-handed, assured, even witty at times, and filled with satisfying special effects, Tremors plays like a redneck "Dune." [19 Jan 1990, p.23]

A sleek little poison pill of a movie.

It's the kind of movie you can settle into, secure in the expectation that you can steal from it more than a little vintage Allen fun.

A gritty, immediate, down-and-dirty satire with a down-and-dirty look.

Zanuck draws impressive performances from her actors. Gregg Allman is surprisingly strong as a slyly menacing dealer, and Max Perlich, as an unpredictable stoolie, makes his scenes pop. The down-and-dirty Rush puts a lot of punch into enervation. [10 Jan 1992, p.77]

Despite a deceptively aimless surface that seems to take off from the initial character's musings on roads not taken, Slacker is more than a gallery of alienated post-collegiates spinning their wheels waiting for something to happen. [4 Oct. 1991, p.47]

Less elliptical and more down-and-dirty than Lang's interesting debut film, ''The Well,'' this one tumbles through Sydney's academic and alternative poetry circles and is built around a lesbian private eye.

Phildelphia, with its velvety textures and rhythms and heads-up soundtrack, does a good job of at least putting the topic on the mainstream table. And it's dramatically potent as well as historically important. [14 Jan 1994, p.73]

Lewis delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as the child-woman who wears tube tops and polyester and matter-of-factly tells the other woman that Early doesn't really whip her. [03 Sep 1993]

It's a handsomely crafted revisionist Western that effectively destigmatizes the legendary Apache raider, reveling as much in political correctness as in its sunset-tinted red sandstone. [10 Dec 1993, p.53]

The film is almost as shaky as the science, but Nichols knows how to get the most out of what amounts to a one-joke comedy, and Bening works virtual miracles.

In short, Roger & Me is a breath of new life blowing through the Rust Belt. So depressed has this country's underclass been that any sign of life from it makes you want to cheer, and the funny and furious Roger & Me makes you want to cheer a lot. [12 Jan 1990, p.38P]

The film never drags, but one of the enjoyable things about it is its way of taking its time letting us get to know and savor the characters.

A big, handsome throwback to star-powered historical costume movies.

Gives three first-rate actors a chance to stretch, and they do.

It's rare that a crime movie achieves such emotional complexity, but this one is smartly layered.

Turbo-charged wallbanger with the IQ of a tire iron. But it jumps off the screen with the mindless panache of a good bad movie.

Sommersby is a handsome throwback to a kind of film that hardly gets made anymore. It's a richly textured period love story powered by two charismatic and intelligent star performances, with a fullness and amplitude that one more readily associates with quality studio films of the past rather than the MTV quick-cut present. [05 Feb 1993, p.25]

In both senses of the word, Posse is a colorful outing that fills a real gap, a film you can respect as well as enjoy. [14 May 1993, p.45]

One of the great newspaper comedies. [24 Nov 1989, p.112p]

There's warmth and a kind of benevolence in bed with them, too, and it carries the film past its compromises. If White Palace is no "Last Tango in Paris," it's at least a sizzling, fat-free "Last Hamburger in St. Louis." [19 Oct 1990, p.33]

A Knight's Tale, will either repel you or win you over. It won me over.

Stylish and arrives at a satisfying cumulative weight, even if it isn't Austen pure.

There's wonder and mystery in "The Secret of Roan Inish," a handful of utterly convincing characters, knit together by Sayles' ability to freight their naturalistic moves with larger, deeper meanings. [24 Feb 1995, p.71]

Deserves a place alongside "Life Is Beautiful" and, yes, even "Schindler's List."

The reason Bread and Roses works as well as it does is that as didactic as it sometimes gets, its heart is always bigger than its ideology.

Spielberg has said that in their collaboration, cut short by Kubrick's death, Kubrick had opened his heart as never before. Although the fingerprint of each is upon A.I, there are times when the prints are blurred and merged. And this film will blur the hitherto distinctive profiles of each.

Filled with affection and verve and will do very nicely until the next shipment of Latin jazz comes along.

Surviving Picasso is always intelligent and often entertaining, even when it perhaps inevitably takes on the character of an upmarket wax museum. [4 Oct 1996]

The pure joy of music-making is what this gem of a film is all about.

Billy Crystal's wit and sweet energies carry it past what could have been a fatal degree of mushiness. Although there's rather too much redemption for one cattle drive, and the film's attitude toward women is at best opaque, Crystal brings warmth and ease to his sharp timing and edgy comic style as he and his pals entertainingly usher us into their brotherhood of schlepdom. [7 June 1991, p.53]

Brings the '30s vividly to the screen.

Few directors lavish as much tenderness upon life's bruised survivors as Kloves does, and many a more prominent director has failed to find in the dust-choked West Texas plains the wistfulness with which Quaid and Ryan fill their most solid and shtick-free work yet. [05 Nov 1993, p.42]

A clever and satisfyingly abundant entertainment.

The kind of movie you can enjoy easily enough, as long as you don't think about it much.

It has a few laughs, but it also has a lot of dead air, and barely any plot at all. In sporting terms, it's no home run.

Perhaps not the most uproarious of Veber's farces, but entertaining and emotionally satisfying all the same.

The film's most remarkable achievement, in this culture of clamor, simply may be its decision to keep the volume down, drawing us in as opposed to pummeling us, as most films do.

This engaging ensemble comedy that could have been called ''Father Doesn't Know Best.''

Gallo has delivered a clever suspense comedy that, thanks to a taut script, creative direction, and first-rate performances from its leads, gives Double Take more weight than one would expect from a genre crowd-pleaser.

For all its shortcomings, Restoration is miles beyond most historical epics. [26 Jan 1996, p.51]

I can't imagine anyone not feeling entertained by Happy, Texas.

A long, warm, satisfying farewell encounter.

Fred Schepisi's "A Cry in the Dark" is a powerful film with a terrific performance by Meryl Streep, her best since "Sophie's Choice." [11 Nov 1988, p.57]

The film works because Depardieu is relaxed enough to turn in persuasive acting that keep us from noticing how plastic the setup is. [4 Feb 1994, p.52]

Figgis's film doesn't match its reach.

There's an engagingly homegrown quality to much of the footage.

It's riveting moviemaking and a boost for what's left of America's ailing collective life. [20 Dec 1991]

May not be deep, but it certainly is lip-smacking.

It's often corny, but it's never boring, and it'll sweep you up in its momentum if you give it a chance.

Scrooged is that rarest of contemporary Hollywood phenomena -- a Christmas movie with Christmas spirit. [23 Nov 1988, p.21]

It's not a perfect film. In fact, it's in many ways a messy film. But if it's disjointed, so are its characters' lives. And they're put onscreen with a veracity and an emotional authenticity that draw you into their tight little barnyard world. [17 Jul 1992, p.31]

American Pimp, if not quite a self-serving orgy of self-justification, can hardly be thought of as a searching look at the skin trade.

Screenwriter John Hughes, making his directing debut, is at his best when he empathizes with the sensitivity in the ugly-duckling Ringwald and Hall characters. [04 May 1984]

An earnest but ultimately scattered effort to put Yippie radical Abbie Hoffman's best foot posthumously forward.

Amusing Made doesn't quite measure up to expectations.

The result is a megabudget "House Party" -- amiable, colorful, filled with glamour and style. [01 Jul 1992]

Less than memorable.

The best scenes come when the family gathers under tense circumstances that give Ian Bannen (as the MP's father) and Miranda Richardson (as his wife) the chance to unleash some civilized ferocity that's genial in his case and icy in hers. Her spurned-wife scene toward the end is the film's most powerful, and still would be even if the stilted sex scenes were volcanic. [22 Jan 1993, p.25]

To have been the film it could have been, crazy/beautiful needed to be messier.

The attempts to supply heart are never more than synthetic, but Schwarzenegger, as the good guy with the good genes, and his goofy sweetness lift Twins into the win column. [9 Dec 1988, p.33]

It epitomizes the kind of high-profile bloodshed we now expect to herald the hazy, lazy, blockbuster-fixated days of summer.

This handsome remake has distinction, but isn't as wrenching, urgent or keeningly lyrical as that 1939 original. [16 Oct 1992, p.33]

Dragonheart has what it needs at its heart - namely, the dragon. The rest of its story, about a disillusioned knight joining forces with the world's last dragon to help peasants overthrow a tyrannical 10th-century king, has a warmed-over quality. [31 May 1996, p.47]

There's always Witherspoon, swimming upstream and never letting it slow her down. Blindingly purposeful, she's a perky blond tornado. Marilyn Monroe would not only have cheered her on. She'd have learned something.

Isn't what you'd call a probing film, but it's a slick and savvy one.

Muppetmaster Jim Henson has done a good job of translating the Turtles - and their 4-foot-tall rat guru, Splinter - into animatronic form. [30 Mar 1990, p.28p]

Child's Play is junk fun. [09 Nov 1988, p.95]

Few actors apart from Williams could bring it off.

The cop-out is mitigated by Allen's ability to impart a comfortable, lived-in quality to his roles, this one included.

Avildsen's - and the screenplay's - blatant manipulations make Freeman's job harder. To his credit, Freeman not only sustains the level of fever pitch at which Clark operates throughout, but succeeds in making him seem admirable, if not exactly likable. A well-meaning steamroller is still a steamroller. Are people who question Clark necessarily wrong? And why, for instance, do the students have to be presented with an either-or picture of Mozart and gospel music? Why can't they have both? The script to Lean on Me plays like something written by the Reagan administration. It supplies a rationale for white-controlled governments to ignore the educational needs of largely black school districts that need funding most. With Freeman breathing inspirational fire, Lean on Me is never dull. But it sidesteps some troubling questions. [3 March 1989, p.43]

Winkler fills the screen with some first-rate actors doing first-rate work. It's a handsomely crafted film as well as an honorable one. But it's also, on the whole, dramatically flat. [15 Mar 1991, p.41]

By the end, we're left with a feeling of depletion rather than resolution, which may have been Gray's intention.

While heartfelt and beautifully crafted, Bringing Out the Dead is too freighted with its protagonist's failed savior complex and is surprisingly lacking in primal impact.

Too bad The Kid gets bogged down in its sentimental manipulations. It has more going for it than you might suppose.

Denys Arcand has satiric fun with the media's way of taking celebrity culture at face value and nothing but. Eventually, though, the film becomes what it's ridiculing.

There's always something touching about the diligence with which Schwarzenegger soldiers through his assignments. There's a play of intelligence and decency in his eyes that exists quite independently of his bashing. Of the Hollywood tribe of virile fists, he's the one who seems most sensitive. [17 Jun 1988, p.31]

Runs dry amid the cactus and sagebrush, but Graham's cartoony take on angelic unstoppableness makes us not mind so much.

My Cousin Vinny is a cement-handed courtroom comedy that somehow lands on its feet when it should fall on its face. In fact, it does fall on its face, more than once. There isn't a single thing in it that you don't know isn't coming. But the chemistry between Joe Pesci as a wiseguy-out-of-water and Marisa Tomei as his shrewd and adorable Brooklyn girlfriend, adrift in the Alabama legal system, keeps it worth watching. [13 Mar 1992, p.28]

Quest for Camelot is easy to sit through and reasonably entertaining. Certainly it should satisfy its target audience. But Warner really needs to journey more boldly toward a personality of its own and offer a real alternative. [15 May 1998, p.D5]

You keep waiting for it to go into orbit, to be really fizzy and outrageous, like the screwball farce it wants to be. Instead, the film settles for the merely serviceable.

Director Kevin Reynolds has difficulty stitching his material together and imparting to it a workable rhythmic scheme, making it more than once seem earthbound. This isn't the Robin Hood it could have been. Its pulse is too erratic. Still, it does give us a handsome and often entertaining new take on Sherwood Forest's most famous straight arrow. [14 June 1991, p.29]

There are laughs in it. But mostly you sit around waiting for it to be funnier, or at least funny more often. The problem is that it hasn't figured out a way to be funny while satisfyingly accommodating the pain in these characters.

There's no Passion in this psychological drama.

More than any of the sappy writing ever does, their collective presence reminds us that any church is about community. The film is tired and trite, but they're terrific, every last one of them. [10 Dec 1993, p.53]

Best when it's playful, toying with the fact that the Mafia has in a single generation been transmogrified from myth to joke.

Derivative and flawed. But it does throw off a few sparks.

Swimming with Sharks is fine when it puts Buddy into outrageous play. But it stumbles in a few other places, requiring a pretty hefty suspension of disbelief - first at Guy's making it into his miserable job that many would kill for, then when he finds himself on the receiving end of romantic attentions. [09 June 1995, p.57]

Botches the chance to delve into the personality of a complex, alluring, and free-spirited woman.

The reason to sit through its uninspired, formulaic moves, however, is its half-dozen spectacular fight sequences.

Just enough laughs to keep you watching.

It's a spirited and essentially optimistic film, but it's also simplistic.

To get right to it, Wim Wenders' Faraway, So Close isn't anywhere near as sublime and magical as his "Wings of Desire." In fact, his new film about angels is sort of a mess, collapsing under the weight of too much plot and too little poetry. That being said, I hasten to add that it's my kind of mess. [28 Jan 1994, p.47]

It's funny and charming most of the time, thanks to Brenda Blethyn.

Honeymoon in Vegas is a sweet but tepid comedy so short on real goofiness that when you do encounter some, you tend to be inordinately grateful. [28 Aug 1992, p.49]

There are times when it moves into the guilty pleasure zone.

Dangerous Beauty is a costume drama that hasn't quite decided whether it wants to exist on the level of serious historical drama or trashy entertainment. [20 Feb 1998, p.C6]

Poison Ivy isn't that much of a film. But part of its charm is that it doesn't pretend to be. It is, however, a great showcase for Drew Barrymore, as bad-news jailbait. [26 Jun 1992, p.29]

It's warmer and fuzzier than the first film, though every bit as tedious.

A space shot worth taking.

Judd is pretty much on her own - an assignment she mostly can handle with aplomb.

Its protagonist haven't enough emotional substance to carry them through the long, darkly lit introspective sequences.

The film collapses under the weight of the effort to shoehorn Shakespeare's story into a context that ultimately doesn't accommodate it.

The Shipping News is good news, but not as good as it could have been.

Sabrina is a nice try that doesn't quite strike the romantic pay dirt it's after, but you won't walk away from it empty-handed. [15 Dec 1995, p.61]

The script by Ian Abrams puts them through strictly formulaic moves, but it has flashes of wit and it's even literate. [10 Sept 1993, p.47]

There's too much control in it and not enough danger.

Something is missing in Bounce, the muted dynamic of which calls forth a perhaps inevitably muted reaction.

I'm not sure that I really want to see "Scream 3,'" but Craven, Williamson, and the screamers certainly bring this one off by not only slapping all their cards on the table, but insisting we admire the way they play them.

Isn't awful, but neither is it the tangy entertainment it could have been.

Putting a provocative spin on the body-fluids subtext, Lowensohn projects stony melancholy and a convincing capacity for romantic impulse as well, making Nadja a surprising little black orchid of a vampire movie. [29 Sept 1995, p.50]

The bathroom jokes in Gun Shy wear thin.

The pieces don't always fit together smoothly, but there's a lot of flavorful work to savor.

It's an amiable little low-grade comedy that gets by with goofing on movies and TV shows as John Ritter, a couch potato Faust, signs up for a cable package from hell (it's got 666 channels - the devil's number, get it?) from satanic Jeffrey Jones. [14 Aug 1992, p.46]

An exercise in excess, but it's the best of the month's crop of mindless films, if only because it jumps off the screen with acertain pop and playfulness.

Although Watermelon Woman is at times rudimentary and slight, it's saved by its humor and its way of tweaking political correctness. [9 May 1997, p.C6]

It doesn't tap deeply enough into any of the characters to compel us to identify with one or another.

Earth Girls Are Easy is 90 minutes of bubble and squeak that doesn't shrink from sharing its subject's vacuousness. But it works often enough. And when it does, it plays like a collision between Zippy and Hairspray. [12 May 1989, p.45]

Sinks under the weight of its ever more inescapably apparent contrivance, and its forced parallels to ''Lear.''

The Freshman, to be fair, offers delights. It's slight, a conceit better written than directed by Alan Bergman, but with flashes of witty satire and moments of screwball charm. [27 July 1990, p.29]

At least hits a certain adrenaline level, and the stunts have panache. If you crave the ''Young Guns'' approach to the Old West, here it is again.

Empire of the Sun is an imperfect film, but at its best it's grand and haunting in ways that only a movie can be. [11 Dec 1987]

Johnny Handsome may lapse into downbeat formula, but its acting is pungent, and, in the case of Barkin and Henriksen, as immediate as a razor slash. [29 Sep 1989, p.34]

It would be gratifying to report that there's a lot more to K-Pax than Spacey at the top of his form, but there isn't.

Could have been a classy thriller. But all the Aramaic in the world can't save it from its own pounding slickness.

Agreeable eye candy and ear candy, but it's too slight to reach as deep as it thinks it wants to reach.

A bit of a cop-out, wrapping in wistful sentimentality a failure to acknowledge a connection that is more than epidermal.

As Die Hard clones go, it's easier to take than most. [06 Nov 1992, p.38]

The moral universe remains unsullied in this lite, lo-cal thriller - the cinematic equivalent of a fizzy summer drink.

Likable, but at times it's also inescapably sketchy and ramshackle.

The Quick and the Dead is a sly, savvy Hollywood sendup of Sergio Leone Westerns with Sharon Stone playing the Clint Eastwood righteous avenger role and Gene Hackman the heavy. You'd call it a spaghetti Western, but the budget is too high. Maybe we'd better think of it as Hollywood's first angel-hair-pasta Western. [10 Feb 1995, p.47]

Space Cowboys does achieve liftoff.

It's too circumscribed and polite for the story it's telling, curiously deficient in the unexpected.

Light It Up isn't a great movie, but it's a cut above most so-called urban thrillers.

In the end, Holy Smoke crashes and burns.

A warmhearted, hardworking little comedy that owes a lot of its charm to its modesty.

Sometimes trips over its own contrivance, especially at the ammo-ridden end.

It's not quite as jolting as the high-impact original, but it's got enough explosiveness to blow away the other sequels in this summer's parade of high-body-count blockbusters. [4 July 1990, p.29]

Nowhere near as dynamic as the title implies. It's hard not to think of it as ''Sleepwalk Lola Sleepwalk.''

Bummer theater.

A big, dark juggernaut of a movie about a big, dark juggernaut of a subject.

Although Warlock doesn't muster enough of a charge to shoot for genre classic status as Sands subsides, it does have a degree of interplay uncommon in such outings. [19 Apr 1991, p.43]

The important thing is that Hurley looks smashing in her succession of red outfits.

Far too long, but its rambunctiousness is engaging, propelled by Stone's virtuosic quick-cutting.

Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct is a slick, trashy, blatantly manipulative thriller that you won't stop watching once you start. [20 Mar 1992, p.25]

It's often a downer, with a sweet but largely passive protagonist.

Silverado plays like a big-budget regurgitation of old Westerns. Whatkeeps it going is the generosity that flows between Kasdan and his actors. It's got benevolent energies, but not the more primal kind needed to renew the standard Western images and archetypes. [10 Jul 1985, p.26]

It takes us nowhere we haven't been before, except geographically.

Has everything you want in a supernatural thriller except thrills.

There's not only physics between them, but chemistry. I.Q. may be slight, but it's a civilized delight. [23 Dec 1994, p.45]

It's mostly just buddies-bonding-over-bullets stuff. [29 Jan 1993, p.24]

It's good cornball mainstream sci-fi, as close to brand-name reliability as this genre gets. [18 Nov. 1994, p.47]

Jungle 2 Jungle is surprisingly bearable. [07 Mar 1997, p.D5]

First Knight, despite its unfortunate title, is not a stupid film, just a mostly flat and talky one. It's gorgeously crafted and filled with goodwill, but it's more admirable than genuinely compelling or moving, much less ablaze with conviction. It's got the trappings, but not the inner fire. [07 Jul 1995, p.27]

Last Action Hero is a spectacularly uneven movie. Its action is hectic, but scattershot and mostly pretty empty. On the other hand, it is entertaining in surprising ways. [18 Jun 1993, p.41]

Neither as rollicking nor as wild as one had hoped, but Tyler's tongue-in-cheek noir goddess transcends cliche and the screenplay's other shortcomings terrifically.

Staggeringly preposterous, yet not without a certain entertainment value. Except for the glasnost angle, there's nothing original about The Package, yet there's something amusing in its reminder of how the political assassination genre has come full circle since "The Manchurian Candidate."

Captures the ensemble quality it was after and the provisional look and feel are perfect stylistic analogues to the lives - the male lives, anyway - that it's portraying.

Never lets down, even if depth of character always takes second place to depth charges.

What saves the film is the charm and earthy humor the actors wring from the spectacle of these four guys getting an early jump on their midlife crises.

King of New York means to slam its excessses into juiced-up nocturnal flamboyance - and does. Assaultive and mindless, it's an incoherent mess. But its manic energies and go-for-broke stylistic gestures keep it from ever seeming dull. [15 March 1991, p.42]

Isn't as dark as ''Heathers'' or as witty as ''Clueless,'' but it's at least pointed in that direction.

Flashdance makes liberal use of jump cuts, strobe lighting and hard-edged, post-punk chic in its dance sequences, it registers as the end product of energy being released by an essentially lyrical temperament. It charms us, makes us want to refrain from scrutinizing it too closely. [31 Jul 1983, p.1]

While it's altogether smaller in its ambitions and achievements than Singleton's terrific "Boyz N the Hood," it at least allows Janet Jackson to emerge as a sympathetic presence, more credible than most pop singers making movie debuts. [23 July 1993]

Bird on a Wire is pedal-to-the-metal moviemaking by the numbers. What it's got going for it is that Goldie Hawn is cute and Mel Gibson is cuter as they struggle to mate screwball comedy to a chase thriller. The pleasant surprise is that Gibson has a flair for light comedy and the timing to bring off double-takes. It's a relief, too, because little else in Bird on a Wire is fresh. [18 May 1990, p.77p]

It's absorbing, although draggy.

Certainly Loaded Weapon delivers laughs. It's just that you notice the spaces between the laughs more readily than with the "Naked Gun" fusillade. I laughed, but I laughed more at Joe Dante's sendup of schlock sci-fi a la William Castle last week in "Matinee." [5 Feb 1993, p.33]

Every time the kid looks at a field of numbers and symbols that start jiggling across a screen to clicky music, but not jiggling as fast as his brain, he's exiling the kind of hero played by Willis to the scrapheap of history. [3 Apr 1998, p.D10]

For all its wide, open spaces, City Slickers II is mostly smoke and mirrors, but thanks to its humor and generosity of spirit, it's an enjoyable diversion in this summer of brang-yer-twang films. [10 June 1994, p.49]

Leaves you questioning its intentions.

While the film dutifully reproduces many incidents from the book, it lacks the spirit and vitality of its source. And - no small problem - it lacks McCourt's voice knitting the vignettes together.

It's a little too long, a little too corny, a little too packaged, but its warmth and regenerative energies make it a winner. [03 Jun 1994]

Captures just enough behind-the-scenes flavor to qualify as a light, bright divertissement.

Good enough, but only just. It's got the hardware, but neither the characters, the imagination, nor the resonance one had hoped for.

There's a little less hilarity in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult than in the first two films, but there's still enough slapstick firepower to put it across. There's efficiency in Peter Segal's direction, but never real zaniness, and in the gaps between the sight gags lurks the onset of sequelitis. [18 Mar 1994, p.68]

Feels a bit flat and underdeveloped.

Needs less down-to-earth flavor and more unearthly force.

They're a far cry from the Coen brothers, or even the Polish brothers, but Josh and Jacob Kornbluth emerge intact from their first filmmaking venture and score more hits than misses in this comedy.

Ends with a fizzle, not a bang.

The Guardian, based on a Dan Greenburg novel, is more suspenseful than most of the movies made from King's books. One reason is that Friedkin allows a certain weight of ominousness to accumulate, being in no hurry to let us know exactly what specific form the threat will take, or even from whom it will come. [27 Apr 1990, p.33p]

It's the cinematic equivalent of one of those prop guns where you pull the trigger and a little flag comes out of the barrel, waving gaily.

The boldest thing about Cutthroat Island may be the way it maintains a comic tone as it portrays him as her boy toy. Things get pretty waterlogged on the island, though. If there's a fresh way to photograph buried-treasure retrieval, Harlin hasn't discovered it. [22 Dec 1995, p.60]

As anyone who saw Pelle the Conqueror remembers, August is great with landscapes, but perhaps because he was telling Bergman's story here instead of his own, he seems on this occasion too reverent. Considering the fierce emotions that are the film's subject, The Best Intentions is too hushed, decorous, solemn. [14 Aug 1992, p.43]

For all its handsomeness, the movie reveals a few cobwebs beginning to gather at the conceptual edges of the Disney animations.

At its best, it will impale you on its raw urgency. At other times, it's a slog through long improvisations that never achieve dramatic liftoff.

A little too shipshape, too eager to please, not quite as anarchic as the best comedies.

Recedes to a string of mere action exploits. These are proficiently executed but, for all their visual authority, not much more than routine.

At least Dragonfly isn't contemptible or altogether dismissible. But it doesn't use Costner well, and it even more unforgivably wastes Kathy Bates.

Anybody who's ever laced on toe shoes, or wanted to, will find something to take away from Center Stage.

The most traditional of Hollywood romances, in that it's resolutely about nice people with nice problems.

Isn't always easy to sit through, but it repays patience. It's an honorable film, and it earns its undertow of poignancy derived from.

Traveller is a little too rosy and pat, but it clambers its way to entertainment value all the same. [2 May 1997]

Ready to Wear has entertaining bits, but for a film about people converging on Paris to increase the hysteria and anxiety levels, Ready to Wear has surprisingly little urgency. [23 Dec 1994, p.48]

The unevenness of what surrounds the star couple is indicative of the script's inability to muster anything more than intermittent sophistication.

Lacks the requisite sense of dread.

Runs out of helium and lands pretty heavily after its airy beginning.

The ensemble quality is high and likable, even if Baumbach's inventiveness as a writer falters after the film's sweet, savvy beginning. [12 June 1998]

In a season mostly given over to unwatchable movies being cleared off studio shelves, it's at least about something. And there's no denying the lurid urgency with which it jumps off the screen.

Individual performances...are flavorful and simpatico.

What goes on when Li isn't fighting the bad guys isn't worth discussing; it's that stupid.

The skies are thick with whizzing bullets and strings being pulled by Shane Black's crude script and Richard Donner's cement-mixer direction. Predictably, the chicks-and-ammo stuff is punctuated by TV cop show repartee. [6 Mar 1987, p.36]

It keeps its promise to throw an hour and a half of lively entertainment at audiences.

Ham-handedly manipulative film.

Miami Blues is just good enough to make you wish Demme would come back with Ward and direct another film based on Willeford's deceptively casual you-saw-it-here-first laser-beam vision of Miami as surreal American litmus. [20 Apr 1990, p.31]

Worth staying with for the respect it pays to its characters' emotions.

A brilliant production of a mediocre play.

Character is almost wholly subordinated to a blast-furnace rendering of the hell into which they're dumped. Seldom will you see so many US military body parts strewn around a movie screen.

Many of the film's images will prove more than some viewers can take.

Uncompromising and unforgiving, but ultimately more self-destructive than any of its characters.

The Neon Bible doesn't always supply the depth or underpinning its images demand, but there's nice work in it, and it won't bore you. [19 Apr 1996, p.55]

The new Stuart Little is OK, but it's never so charming that you forget you're watching a manufactured object.

Provoke us into examining whether the onus is on the man for turning it into a commercial proposition or the woman for agreeing to his offer.

Flipper, the latest incarnation of everybody's favorite dolphin, doesn't exactly make waves, but it's easy to take, especially when the underwater cameras are working. [17 May 1996, p.56]

By any other standard, the creatures in Monsters, Inc. would be impressive. But by the high standard Pixar not only set itself, but invented, they're only ordinary.

Although Truth or Dare makes you wish it had dug more deeply, it nevertheless convinces you that there's more to Madonna than the stage personas she sheds like skins. It's as much an exercise in packaging as in documentary, but at least the package isn't empty. [17 May 1991, p.29]

3 Ninjas is a skilled balancing act, a throwback to Disney's old live-action family films, starring and targeted to pre-teens. [07 Aug 1992, p.30]

Even as a romantic confection it would soar higher, glow brighter, if it had permitted itself some texture, some bite. It's too simply emblematic to muster all the magic it needs, even though it has a pair of utterly winning performances by Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda. [29 July 1994, p.53]

You're hooked enough to keep watching, even if the characterizations veer toward the two-dimensional.

Martin makes Bilko's roguishness endearing, and entertaining enough to carry the film even if it is essentially an overextended half-hour sitcom episode. [29 Mar 1996, p.105]

Gremlins 2 is one of the few sequels that improves on the original. [15 Jun 1990, p.33p]

Juicy acting and an intense individual and communal commitment that seems to boil up from the streets carry Southie past its structural and technical limitations. [28 May 1999]

The problem with 8 1/2 Women isn't that what you see is what you get; it's that what you see is all you get.

The film keeps being yanked back from nothingness by this or that clever sendup, delivered by a small army of invigorated performers who seem to push off from one another's energy levels.

It's a ponderous but not unenjoyable comedy.

Lopez is not yet the actor Caviezel is. Still, she fills her performance with conviction, does a couple of her own stunts, and has enough star presence to fill the big screen.

Oliver Stone's Wall Street plays like "Platoon" in civvies. It's a good bad movie, unable to muster the moral firepower of the earlier film, but entertaining on the level of a big, bold, biff-bam-pow comic strip that likes high-profile high-rolling more than it perhaps realizes. [11 Dec 1987, p.45]

2000 isn't about nobility and humility; saving the planet from evil collectors is what sells video games.

Despite the revival of narrative vigor accompanying Licence to Kill, you will perhaps sense that I find it too sane, too engineered. Preposterousness seems an integral part of the James Bond universe, which I'd hate to think was turning rational, falling into step with the '80s by abandoning fancifulness. Mercifully, Licence to Kill isn't altogether stripped of excess. [14 July 1989, p.65]

It plays something like Robert Altman Lite. It's saved from writer-director Willard Carroll's increasingly forced linkages and made watchable by the resourceful acting of its ensemble, some of whom get more to work with than others. [22 Jan 1999, p.D4]

Richard Attenborough's film version of the long-running Broadway musical hit A Chorus Line not only avoids the disaster that many had predicted for it, but is often surprisingly effective and enjoyable, transcending its troubled history. [20 Dec 1985]

There's a lot to like in Mr. Holland's Opus, even if you find yourself wishing it had been more artfully written, directed - and trimmed. [19 Jan 1996, p.58]

Although it's more concerned with justifying its title than with making contact with any real subversiveness, criminal or cultural, Airheads is the kind of sweet fluff it's easy to say yes to in August. [5 Aug 1994, p.46]

In the end, it's the snatches of music, mangled as it is, and the mechanics of staging it, in the absence of Leigh's usual raw, urgent psychic collisions, that keep Topsy-Turvy from seeming merely a gorgeous wax museum.

Washington and Jolie earn their stripes here, but more texture would have resulted, I think, in more terror.

A romantic fairy tale that's light and in several ways seductive, if not exactly filling.

There are moments when faltering levels of energy and inventiveness threaten to turn Too Much Sleep into a nonevent. But it signals the arrival of a promising filmmaker and is worth sticking with.

Pictorially, Alive is breathtaking. But there's no real exploration of character or primal drives. [15 Jan 1993, p.48]

There's nothing seriously wrong with Man in the Moon. It's sincere, heartfelt and handsomely crafted - but within limits, and ultimately it's the limits you feel most strongly. [04 Oct 1991, p.43]

Just as Anspaugh and Pizzo pushed all the obvious buttons with their high school basketballers in "Hoosiers," so they turn Rudy into the "Rocky" of South Bend. It may be that Rudy's crowning piece of perseverance consisted of his dogging Anspaugh and Pizzo to film his story. It must be a comfort to Hoosiers Larry Bird and Don Mattingly to know that when the time comes for their biofilms, Anspaugh and Pizzo are in the phone book. [13 Oct 1993, p.75]

The romantic stuff is tepid. Luckily, his onscreen buddy, Hall, never strays far. Coming to America is at its best when they're playing off each other, and not just as the prince and his buddy. [29 Jun 1988, p.69]

Cadillac Man isn't perfect, but it's got enough peppy lowlife turmoil under its hood to pass most of what's on the road these days. [18 May 1990, p.77p]

A-list soap opera, high-class and high-gloss.

It's a small film, and a far from perfect one, but it allows her (Theron) to extend her range as no previous role has done.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a sturdily crafted but only mildly amusing goof on Kevin Costner's 1991 Sherwood Forest outing. It further confirms that Mel Brooks has lost something off his fastball since Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. [28 July 1993, p.22]

This 19th Bond installment is passable, but only just.

Remains a frustratingly opaque study. There's something missing, namely Kaufman.

Franken's feel-good inanities make you laugh, but the insipid script in which they're embedded lacks the courage of its satiric convictions. [12 Apr 1995, p.90]

Alan Rudolph's beautifully burnished, heartache-filled evocation of Dorothy Parker and her Algonquin Round Tablemates bites off a bit more than it can spew. But a couple of things make it special. [23 Dec 1994, p.45]

While the appeal of Guinevere is decidedly intermittent, it's there, and the acting is right on the money.

A slight but diverting series of set pieces.

What makes it worth sitting through is the chance it offers to catch up on the technical advances since the last installment.

There's been talk about Van Damme deepening his excursions into acting. Wisely, though, he keeps Timecop on a comic strip level. [16 Sep 1994, p.72]

It's heady in the beginning, chaotic throughout, and numb with the suddenness of the Internet economy's plummet at the end.

It's no meal, but it'll tide you over.