Jay Carr

After revitalizing baseball movies with "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham," he's now three for three with the funny, quirky, rueful, and richly textured For Love of the Game.

Watson's character grows in importance until she eclipses the recessive Luzhin.

It's the kind of romantic comedy that doesn't cheapen the word ''heartwarming.''

In the end, it's simple warmth and sincerity that make this ensemble piece so disarming.

There's a layer of grim comedy in Butterfly Kiss. But what's exciting about it is its gritty way of remaining so uncompromisingly bleak in its psychopathology. [7 Jun 1996, p.58]

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]

It'll make a natural double-feature repertory-house companion to The Player for years to come. It's filled with humor that has paid its dues. [21 Aug 1992, p.38]

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

It's brilliantly precise in its detailing, stylishly jagged and sensual by turns, and utterly unpredictable.

Kindergarten Cop finds Arnold up to his old tricks, which will be exactly what his fans will want to know. But it's tough on kids and may make more than a few feel uncomfortable. [21 Dec 1990, p.51]

The film never quite hits a sure-footed stride. The fictional love story stays fictional. But ''Pearl Harbor'' delivers the main event.

In short, A Christmas Story isn't just about Christmas; it's about childhood and it recaptures a time and place with love and wonder. It seems an instant classic, a film that will give pleasure to people not only this Christmas, but for many Christmases to come. [19 Nov 1983, p.1]

Bigelow's walk on the wired side isn't perfect, but she certainly grabs us by our voyeurism and yanks us into the head trip of the year. "Strange Days" is more than wired - it's loaded. [13 Oct 1995, p.37]

It's sweeping yet intimate, stately yet impassioned, stylized yet immediate.

Those who can endure it will find Kirby Dick's film provocative and surprisingly touching. [14 Nov 1997, p.D11]

In the crowded landscape of anti-imperial and anti-colonial film, Claire Denis' Chocolat is a standout. Never raising its voice, avoiding the usual didacticism, Denis brings subtlety, sensitivity and an uncommonly clear personal vision to her memories of colonialism in Africa, where she spent her youth. [31 Mar 1989, p.34]

Fire in the Sky, the latest abducted-by-aliens movie, is no Close Encounters. It's hardly any encounter at all. [13 Mar 1993, p.10]

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]

Despite the heavy-handedness of "The Night We Never Met," you feel there's a good New York comedy in Leight's future. "The Night We Never Met," although better than "Slaves of New York," isn't quite it. [30 Apr 1993, p.52]

The Crimson Rivers could teach many an American thriller a thing or two about sophisticated creepiness.

It's all we ask of a film but almost never get, as it first makes us squirm, then makes us cheer.

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.

A small film and, ultimately, a satisfying one.

The trouble with Grumpy Old Men is the patronizing attitude -- ageism, really -- that takes a too-broad approach to their geriatric world and renders it plastic. It is too cute and sanitized to allow its performers much in the way of opportunity.

Cruise is believable as an athlete; and the cocky bravado he emits to impress his girlfriend (played with matching complexity and maturity by Lea Thompson) has a fetching sense of lift, too. But his vulnerability is what's most refreshing and ingratiating about Cruise's Stef. [05 Nov 1983]

It's flawed, but it's also rich. And how many films make you feel that you and the filmmaker are following the course of a dream?

There's no comic edge at all to Sister Act. It's all Whoopi and the three sisters, battling plastic writing and chintzy production values, convincing you that filmmaking this pedestrian ought to be declared the eighth deadly sin. [29 May 1992, p.34]

In its sweet, slightly melancholy, gently humorous way, it fills the screen with the freshest, most winning love story we've seen in ages. [14 Feb 1992, p.39]

It's not the mega-tech or the shootouts that make Ghost in the Shell memorable, but the ghostliness of it, its ability to convince us that Kusangai - no less than Rutger Hauer's strangely noble android in "Blade Runner" - has a human's ability to conceptualize her own mortality. Nor does arid intellectual speculation make Ghost in the Shell what it is. [1 Mar 1996, p.29]

Hou Hsiao-hsien is one of the masters of world cinema, and Flowers of Shanghai represents a shift for him. Stunning and hypnotic, it's his first period piece. [07 Apr 2000]

Sometimes gets bogged down in its own wordiness.

Mostly, though, Lynch fills the screen with a lot of cynically off-putting and sadistic violence. In place of incident, character and a bemused view of small-town life, corrupt beneath its cherry-pie surface, we are essentially asked to witness torture - mostly of Laura Palmer, as her troubles lead her to self-destruct with drugs and promiscuity, including a couple of side trips to the Canadian bordello known as One-Eyed Jacks. For all the violence in Lynch's "Blue Velvet," that film maintained a comic dimension. The violence in "Wild at Heart," for all its extravagance of gesture, was hollow - stylized, not real...Here, there's no comedy, nothing surreal, just wave after wave of titillation. Except that it doesn't titillate. It depresses. There's no psychic charge on any of it. It proceeds from no artistic conviction, just from a cynical desire to squeeze a few more bucks from the already overworked corpse of Laura Palmer. It shows how quickly a creative impulse can be exhausted - from quirky originality toying with humanity's darker impulses to dispirited quasi-porn. [29 Aug 1992, p.23]

Starts out as a somewhat weary farce of infidelity, but turns into something a lot more gratifying, namely a comedy of mercy.

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.

Although 1492: Conquest of Paradise is a classier failure than Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, the glum truth is that both are lost at sea. [09 Oct 1992, p.85]

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]

I wish Blue Chips had pursued its indictment further up the food chain. But it brings off its tricky double mission, being entertaining while not letting anybody off the hook as it reminds us that amateur athletics is big business. [18 Feb 1994, p.39]

Although perhaps inescapably derivative, the film rides its cast's warm and vibrantly meshed energies - to say nothing of its gender novelty. It's filled with heart and muscle as the women tired of being scammed, slammed and rammed deposit the exploitation film in new realms of payback. [06 Nov 1996, p.D1]

It offers pleasures of a kind that fewer and fewer films even seem to remember, much less aspire to.

Kazan's dislocating strategies carry Dream Lover past a few stumblings and credibility lapses, ushering us into Ray's debilitating alienation, imprisoning us with Spader in Ray's projection of his fantasies onto a woman he realizes he knows nothing about. "Dream Lover" is a thriller that demonizes women more cleverly and slickly than most. [20 May 1994, p.52]

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

A clever, affectionate, and entertaining holiday snack for sci-fi fans. Falling somewhere between slick and cheesy.

It's not afraid to play cornball when it isn't playing baseball, but The Rookie gets away with it.

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]

Even allowing for differences in national styles, Kikujiro sprawls and stumbles. It's a road movie that turns into its own detour.

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]

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels essentially remains a duet of exquisitely turned gestures exchanged by Martin and Caine. It isn't killer comedy. Sometimes its leisurely pace veers dangerously close to slackness. But it's as close as Hollywood comedy comes to chamber music. [14 Dec 1988, p.77]

There are many things that Better Than Sex is better than, although sex is not among them. It is better than a root canal, an IRS audit, or a rained-out ballgame.

A bittersweet world, and it's frankly one to which we've been before, but seldom do we see it rendered with such exquisite, if pained, craftsmanship.

The reconstituted Vanishing is a pretty banal proposition. [05 Feb 1993, p.27]

In short, My Fellow Americans is too much like the bland, numbing political campaigns of which we're still trying to clear our heads. [20 Dec 1996, p.E6]

The strength of Jacob's Ladder is that we never know what the next scene will be. But that's also its weakness. We don't feel involved with the characters here. We just feel jerked around. Jacob's Ladder, finally, is bummer theater. [2 Nov 1990, p.73]

Isn't always on the money, but when it is, it really is.

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]

Badlands is one of the great banality-of-evil films. [29 May 1998, p.C9]

Causes one to wish... that movies about the supernatural could make contact with supernatural script doctors.

Has that rarest of qualities in movies that think of themselves as religious. I'm talking about the vision thing. And the ability to make morality entertaining.

Sitting through it is like waking up on Christmas morning to find a stockingful of styrofoam.

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]

Wacky enough and gadget-driven enough to appeal to bored kids looking for fresh energies.

The question in Red Planet isn't whether there's any life on Mars, but whether there's any life in the film. The answer is no.

Pretty lame stuff. Already it seems to be passing with the speed of light into the limbo of utterly forgettable "who-will-I-take-to-the-prom?" movies.

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]

Mystery Science Theater 3000 restores your faith in an ordered universe, compelling you to reflect that those campy movies from the '50s and '60s did, after all, have a purpose, although it wasn't easy to discern at the time. [19 Apr 1996, p.54]

Revenge degenerates into a macho dance between Costner and Quinn, with the film chewing up and spitting out Stowe's character in troubling ways. [16 Feb 1990, p.89]

Mixed Nuts is that cinematic oddity: a film that's pretty awful, yet almost perversely endearing -- despite the tiredness with which it plays out its labored jokes before bringing them together in a gooey Christmas ending. [21 Dec 1994, p.94]

Gas Food Lodging is a film about nourishment on a financial and emotional shoestring. It's a delight. [19 Sept 1992, p.29]

If you get dizzy watching Final Analysis, it may be because it's such a "Vertigo" wannabe. But director Phil Joanou is no Hitchcock, and Kim Basinger, its star, is no Kim Novak, even though Joanou poses and lights her in a critical lighthouse scene the way Hitchcock posed and lit Novak in that bell tower in "Vertigo." The big problem with "Final Analysis," though, is that Richard Gere's pivotal expert shrink is pretty easy to fool. Not until late in the film does he literally run to a library to learn about one of Freud's classic case histories. You have to suspend a ton of disbelief to buy the assumptions you have to make about him, starting with his gullibility. [7 Feb 1992, p.29]

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.

Its attributes and achievements are modest, but its arias, duets, and ensembles are engaging all the same.

The big difference between Luc Besson's "La Femme Nikita" and this big, slick remake is that this new film has less visual edge and is more sentimental. It's more upfront with the idea that Maggie, as she's called here, has feelings. Still, Fonda's at her most compelling in the early scenes. [19 March 1993, p.50]

German director Uli Edel's film of Last Exit to Brooklyn, while honorable, just doesn't roar off the screen the way the novel roared off the page. [11 May 1990, p.33p]

The screen Grease seemed at the time a big, overblown version of the sassy, gritty stage musical. Now the differences seem less important. What the two versions share are sizzle and a refusal to ignore the sexual energy of an exuberant cast. Grease seems kickier now than it did 20 years ago. [27 Mar 1998, p.D6]

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

Fresh is urgent, impressively thought out, tightly coiled. Written, directed and acted with invigorating subtlety, there's nothing stale about Fresh. It's an original, and it's terrific. [31 Aug 1994, p.27]

Intermittently engaging but inescapably overextended.

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

Not only exhilarating and cathartic. It's too funny to be ignored.

More self-mockery is needed, less self-regard. [07 Apr 1995, p.90]

With the charismatic Williams and Sohn leading the way, "Slam" electrifyingly moves beyond wishful thinking to hot immediacy, and, yes, earned optimism. [23 Oct 1998, p.D4]

It's one of the few films that persuades you that it went out to meet the war and bring it to us with verisimilitude.

Ullmann's film is an achievement of heart and consequence, as full of integrity as Bergman, yet demonstrating more mercy.

There's nothing paltry about its poultry.

Exuberantly mixing live action and animation, it's a high-energy dream teaming that shrewdly takes advantage of the chance to goof on Jordan's temporary retirement from basketball and unsuccessful fling at baseball, and even more winningly exploits the antic wildness that always distinguished Warner Bros.' bouncy Looney Tunes. [15 Nov 1996, p.D1]

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.

It seems more a geek show than a slab of marketing wizardry.

It's got sharp wit and a wise heart, and as good as it was onstage, it's even better as a movie. [22 Dec 1993, p.33]

By placing all its faith in production design and high-powered computerized effects, and not enough where it really matters, namely character and atmosphere, The Haunting relegates itself to the slag heap of embarrassing claptrap. [23 July 1999, p.D4]

Great Balls of Fire is little more than just a whole lotta fakin' goin on. [30 June 1989, p.41]

Kids who like the TV episodes will find more of the same here, and larger. [30 June 1995, p.53]

Branagh and Love's Labour's Lost all but will themselves into liftoff. They achieve it, and in doing so, they somehow make it right to our pleasure centers with their generous embrace of stardust and pizazz.

Don't Say a Word can be thought of as a case of Dial B for Boring.

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

Cronenberg's direction is technically impressive, but he's better suited to stories based on surges of feeling between killers, not lovers. This M. Butterfly never takes wing. [08 Oct 1993]

This tight, tense black-and-white Anthony Mann film revived Westerns and kept Jimmy Stewart's career alive during the actor's Korean War stint. [19 Apr 1991, p.46]

Too quick to uncritically and unthinkingly accept its subject's rollickingly self-mythologizing take on himself.

With Carrey hitting a career peak, this Grinch doesn't steal Christmas; it restores the season by helping energize us enough to make it through the whole thing.

Beneath its relentlessly decorous surface, "There's Always Tomorrow" is an Eisenhower-era horror story, starring America as a void with sharp teeth. [25 May 1990, p.50p]

Starts by cheating death and ends by cheating us.

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]

May not emerge as the biggest disaster of the holiday movie season, if only because we haven't yet seen all the other year-end films. But it is a huge high-energy misfire, bringing Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, and Cameron Crowe to earth with a thud.

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]

Mo' Better Blues has problems. Lee hates being compared with Woody Allen, but it looks as if he's going to do what Allen did in trying a new kind of film until it works. [03 Aug 1990, p.29p]

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]

As quietly confident in its emotional grounding as any American film you'll see this year, and animated by a radiant debut performance from Ashley Judd in the title role, Ruby in Paradise is refreshingly removed from the usual strivings for effect. Part of its allure is that it plays out in what seems like real time. [12 Nov 1993, p.49]

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

Seems to be going through a series of motions so obviously virtual that it makes you wish that the filmmakers had stayed away from the computer keyboards entirely and stuck with the rotting tape look.

If Blaze is a bit mushy, it's also more than skin deep. It's the kind of film whose shortcomings are easy to minimize. It's a muted last hurrah for a departed and worthy brand of populism, but a hurrah all the same. [13 Dec 1989, p.66P]

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.

It isn't often that lives of quiet desperation are served up with such pearly restraint.

The Little Mermaid is more than Disney Lite, as so many of the studio's animations of the last couple of decades have been. It offers a strong link to the classic Disney tradition while generating freshly hatched delights. And it puts Disney back in the animation game in a big way. [17 Nov 1989, p.85p]

The Krays is one of the artiest, eeriest gangster movies ever made. [15 Sep 1990, p.14p]

The film is gentle and carries a simple moral.

Hedaya is sublime.

Distress of Parents is a real pleasure.

Franco Zeffirelli's reputation as a popularizer of Shakespeare stems from this gusty swirl of a 1968 production built around - and aimed at - teens. The uncomprehending looks on the faces of Leonard Whiting's Romeo and Olivia Hussey's Juliet only increase the film's demographic pull, as poetry is replaced with prettiness. [18 Jan 1991, p.32p]

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.

As a flawed but lovably lionhearted woman, Barrymore triumphantly comes of age as an actress.

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

What Happened Was nails contemporary isolation as few films do. It's filled with acute insights and observations of the wary yet hopeful circling that people do in conversation on a first date. It's a gem of a chamber play. [17 Sep 1994, p.37]

A slick, twisty, top-of-the-line crime thriller with gorgeously sensual textures and a screenful of wickedly faceted performances.

A surprisingly warm and engaging entertainment - brassy, schmaltzy, funny.

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]

Trips early and never gets up off the floor.

There's some terrific music in "Blues Brothers 2000," but you have to sit through a lot of tedious overkill to hear it. [06 Feb 1998, p.F5]

The story is spun forth ravishingly, tenderly, and urgently, with a captivating mix of beauty, spare sophistication, and profound humanity.

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]

The film is mostly Lemmon's in a quietly stunning performance you frankly didn't know he had in him. [27 Oct 1989, p.29p]

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.

White Men Can't Jump isn't perfect. But most of the time it's a lot of fun. Its funky moves are going to put more smiles on more faces than any regular season or tournament basketball TV throws at you. [27 Mar 1992, p.25]

Writer and director Tim Disney raises a provocative point about how radical and inconvenient true faith can be.

Hollywood filmmaking at its best, brimming over with feeling, texture, spirit, and several kinds of keenness that transmute experience into big pop myth.

It's terse, atmospheric, fatalistic, with vertiginous camera angles and edits offsetting its gray documentary flatness.

Newman is an American classic, one of the few actors Hollywood has allowed to age and deepen. He and Nobody's Fool don't so much shine as glow softly and steadily. [13 Jan 1995, p.73]

Although Species benefits from a new generation of computer-generated visuals, it can't hold a tentacle to Alien. Alien was more old dark-house thriller than sci-fi. Species turns into just another day in the LA pest-control biz. [07 July 1995, p.28]

Offers little in the way of pleasure, even to its target audience -- the easily pleased and undemanding.

Although the limits on Beverly Hills Cop III are pretty obvious, it's not a total write-off. Still, it's time to stop making movies about Murphy's Motown cop and start making one about Serge. [25 May 1994, p.69]

The story is told handsomely and affectingly with images, facial expressions and body language. [16 Oct 1992]

When a tone is sustained as confidently and with as many delicious flourishes as A Shock to the System manages, and the screen is filled with characterful performances, it's a sign the director is doing something right. [23 Mar 1990, p.46p]

Clockwatchers may not be perfect, but it's on to something. [22 May 1998, p.D5]

Haunting, powerfully acted, penetratingly written, it's about people coming home -- and not coming home -- to their marriages.

There's no dust on this snazzy new Hercules. It's got lots of muscle and lots of lift. [27 June 1997, p.C1]

Bitter Moon would be a camp classic if it weren't so dispiriting watching Roman Polanski cannibalize and then finally parody himself into narrative and artistic collapse. The film's big problem is that it's so totally devoid of the sexual energy it needs to traverse the gantlet of perversity through which Polanski sends it. [15 Apr 1994, p.94]

The concept of Air America is refreshing, but its enactment goes nowhere fast. [10 Aug 1990]

The film's biggest problem, however, is its naive inability to understand that sex comedies, to amuse, must be about more than sex.

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

A flimsy sister act.

On screen as on the page, The Age of Innocence is a stunning period piece filled with depth charges. [17 Sept 1993, p.49]

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.

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

A feast of a film that goes on feeding you long after you've left the theater. [25 Dec 1995, p.83]

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]

See Spot Run isn't solely responsible for the dumbing down of movies, but it's part of the dismal phenomenon.

"In Cold Blood," "Badlands," "The Executioner's Song," and now, joining those grisly milestones on the heartland hit list, and every bit their equal, is Boys Don't Cry.

A second-rate novel and a second-rate movie, in which some interestingly faceted acting can do only so much. [28 Sep 1990, p.46p]

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

Ladybird, Ladybird is full of heart and compassion, but it's also uncompromising and unconsoling. [10 Mar 1995, p.52]

Michael J. Fox seems a lot breezier and smarter than what's surrounding him in For Love or Money. It's an old-fashioned romantic comedy that's a little too old-fashioned as it clanks through its plot. [1 Oct 1993, p.52]

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.

The script is too eager to rush to the high-concept payoff without providing dramatic or characterizational underpinning. [26 June 1992, p.34]

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]

Depardieu and Rappeneau have not so much revived Cyrano as restored it. [25 Dec 1990, p.87p]

Hook touches neither fantasy nor soulfulness nor yearning. Mostly, it's benign spectacle in which the actors keep yielding the camera to some expensive playground or other. Hook is neither wistful nor primal. It's film's most expensive wind-up toy. [11 Dec. 1991. p.53]

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]

Disappoints.

A Bronx Tale is a joy, a film that comes unerringly from someone's heart and experience, and not from a power lunch of agents with clients to be packaged. [1 Oct 1993, p. 49]

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]

Friday is funnier and funkier than "Bad Boys," more homegrown-seeming, less manufactured. It plays like "House Party" with attitude. [26 Apr 1995]

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

It's "Beach Blanket Bingo" revisited, but with a Eurocast and more exotic locations.

Whatever portion of the alienated teen angst championship Thora Birch left unclaimed after ''American Beauty,'' she nails down brilliantly in Ghost World.

While Memoirs of an Invisible Man has its moments - like so many Chevy Chase movies - you spend an awful lot of time waiting between laughs. [28 Feb 1992, p.28]

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

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]

Mostly a screenful of nothingness.

A confident and promising directorial debut, one that has the feel of an experienced director to it, from the hypnotic unfolding of scenes to the finely observed character details.

This ponderous, mostly empty exercise at least has ambition. It wants to be more than the usual gangsta zap. But about the best that can be said for it is that it dresses well. [25 Feb 1994, p.48]

The women here aren't afraid to get extreme about love, but in the end, you sense that they are too sound to destroy themselves over the worthless man they have allowed to personify it. That's what lifts Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown from the amusing to the sublime. [23 Dec 1988, p.23]

Degenerates into a lot of dull declaiming and attitudinizing, despite a sly tongue-in-cheek quality brought by a preening Stuart Townsend to the Lestat role he inherited from the utterly humorless Tom Cruise.

Sweetly earnest little drama.

Rendering experience synthetic, replacing desperation with cuteness, Frankie & Johnny is Love Lite. [11 Oct 1991, p.49]

Essentially, it's 90 minutes of mostly disarming nothingness. [10 Dec 1993, p.59]

Beneath its glitz, poses, and pub crawlers and club prowlers, it's an old-fashioned morality tale.

The bleakness of Rosetta will not be for all, but it's one of the best films of the year.

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]

Wonderfully cast and slickly directed, but so crudely written.

Naked is one of the most scorchingly compelling films in years, Mike Leigh's masterpiece, an unflinching vision of civilization in retreat, life as apocalypse. [4 Mar. 1994, p.51]

It's a charmer.

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

The Edge is mostly corny macho mano-a-mano stuff, made watchable by spectacular scenery and a lot of understatement in Anthony Hopkins's performance and David Mamet's screenplay - until an overwrought ending brings it down. [26 Sep 1997, p.D7]

In both senses of the word, American Psycho wastes its women.

Isn't as funny as it is crude, and isn't as crude as it is labored.

Hard-driving and propulsive as it is, the film is unable to hide the fact that Woo seems not only to be repeating himself, but parodying his earlier films on a much bigger scale, more crudely and coarsely.

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.

It sounds like what in this country would be a grim tale, but in The Snapper (Dublin working-class slang for baby) Stephen Frears and an Irish cast turn it into a terrific little comedy of nonstop vitality and warmth. [17 Dec 1993, p.98]

Walter Hill's "Wild Bill" is a too-literal evocation of the played-out frontier experience. It's imaginatively shot and bravely and even iconically acted by Jeff Bridges as Wild Bill Hickock, but it's numbed and numbing. [04 Mar 1996, p.32]

Seems so preoccupied with genuflection that it never achieves its subject's heart-pounding immediacy.

Writing ignites miracles in Henry Fool, and Hartley's exquisite control over his compositions and pacing makes the outrages, biological and otherwise, funnier than you might believe. [01 Jul 1998]

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.

To paraphrase Andre Malraux, it invokes but it doesn't always supply, doesn't course strongly enough with the book's themes of blood and earth and dislocation.

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.

Fusco's script undercuts whatever freshness it may have brought to its view of Billy the Kid with a steady stream of howlers, most of which involve Kiefer Sutherland, as the sensitive member of the gang. [12 Aug 1988, p.24]

it's an OK genre movie, providing an honest quota of scares and carried by Hoffman's way of alternating stoniness and warmth as the guy in the anticontamination suit. [10 Mar 1995, p.49]

A gorgeous autumnal period piece that catches a vanishing proprietary class on the eve of its extinction in Ireland in 1920.

There isn't a single chase scene in The Russia House. There's scarcely a love scene. And it dares to be slow. But it's attached to feelings as few spy movies are - and as even le Carre's book was not. The greatest compliment one can pay The Russia House is to say that it's the kind of spy movie that's making spy movies obsolete. [21 Dec 1990, p.49p]

Although it's the first time Hank Ketcham's mischievous kid has been brought to the big screen after a few TV versions, the film has the air of a weak, warmed-over sequel. [25 June 1993, p.51]

Risky Business is the sleeper of the summer. It's a refreshing change from the usual dumb teenage ripoffs, the slickest American film since "Trading Places" and "War Games," and a strong directorial debut for Paul Brickman, who knows his way around teen fantasies. [05 Aug 1983]

Its squandering of talent makes Class Action a film that deserves to be disbarred, not reviewed. [15 Mar 1991]

Simple in outline, liberating and exquisite, The Secret Garden is loaded with meaning. [13 Aug 1993, p.43]

In short, the film lacks the social context that would have enabled Death Becomes Her to take on invigorating breadth and bite. It needs more of the malicious zest that Streep's character has. Its last half is as hollow as its first half is funny. [31 July 1992, p.33]

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

This one is a tensely clammy screw-tightener about an ex-con (Gene Nelson) pressured to become part of a bank heist. No cop ever chewed a toothpick better than Sterling Hayden does here. [07 Jan 1996, p.C31]

There are so many wonderful moments in Trixie and so few films like it that you wish Rudolph had given it a few more rewrites.

Matilda is fresh and spirited, and while the edge on it keeps the film interesting, DeVito manages to tilt it expertly from darkness to light. [02 Aug 1996, p.E4]

It's a lyrical, gorgeous, big-budget follow-up to "Like Water for Chocolate," and it's easy to take. It's easier still to fall in with the movie's openheartedness, its generosity of spirit. [11 Aug 1995, p.45]

Terrific French film about that most universal of subjects - work.

As no other Holocaust film quite has, Europa, Europa, with dreamlike clarity, refuses to let us forget that hate works. And that self-hate works even better. [19 July 1991, p.23]

Slly, sublime, buoyant mischief that is virtually without parallel in 20th-century art, much less 20th-century film.

It works not because ridiculousness is concealed, but because ridiculousness on this scale becomes something else. Don't let anyone tell you that Stargate, lifeless script and all, isn't clunky fun, proudly trembling on the brink of classic camp. [28 Oct 1994, p.48]

Brilliant and impassioned as Day Lewis' performance is, it isn't the only reason this film is so exhilarating. Director Jim Sheridan, who clearly has assimilated Brown's two memoirs (the film takes its name from the first), draws Christy's impoverished Irish family with idiomatic rightness and a satisfying and rare (to American films at least) emotional fullness. [15 Sept, 1989, p.41]

Essentially, the film's strategy is to fight predictability with bonehead amiability, and on this level it's a crowd-pleaser. [27 Dec 1991, p.28]

Sad, funny, brilliant.

Narrow Margin isn't awful. It's solid and adult, but plodding and dull, rather like a living room filled with the last generation's furniture - not old enough to be considered an interesting antique, yet fundamentally out of touch with the present. It's too reasonable for its own good. [21 Sep 1990, p.44p]

There are laughs here and there, and Graham and Klein aren't nearly as grating as what surrounds them. But there's no getting around the fact that far from seeming a labor of love, Say It Isn't So seems merely labored.

It's not hard to take, but neither does it go anywhere really interesting, nor do the characters much involve us. The curious thing is that it had every reason to register as something more detailed and specific than the flatly generic thing it is. [23 Apr 1993, p.50]

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]

Popcorn is a "Phantom of the Shlopera" - the kind of corny B-movie midnight campers can sink their plastic fangs into. [01 Feb 1991, p.21]

Natural Born Killers is going to be a love-it or hate-it film. But it's an important film. Pumped up, jumped up, yet asking the right questions, [it] is more than an attention-grabber. It's a grenade pitched into the media tent. [26 Aug 1994, p.51]

It's amazingly suspenseless and devoid of substance. [05 Mar 1993]

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]

'Titanic'' was a case of a cheeseball story riding terrific effects. The Perfect Storm is in every important way deeper.

The Muppet Christmas Carol plays like an overextended rerun of a not-quite top-drawer Muppet show. [11 Dec 1992, p.53]

You're never unaware of the calculation underlying this Jetsons movie. Still, it succeeds in teleporting the clan to the movie screen. [6 July 1990, p.61]

Hughes succeeds more than he has any right to in Uncle Buck because he's able to override sitcom cliche with generosity. It's a smart idea to let Candy play feelings instead of just fatness and bluster. For a movie that isn't really that good, Uncle Buck is surprisingly likable. [16 Aug 1989, p.77]

It's much closer to a European film in sensibility than to one of Hollywood's factory products.

But despite the vibrancy of its images and the exquisiteness of its craftsmanship, Jefferson in Paris doesn't often light a fire under its material. [07 Apr 1995]

It's one of the great sister movies and one of the great performance movies. [26 Jan 1996]

The film has mood and feeling, but it can't take the material that final mile into the inexplicable. [10 Jul 1992, p.35]

In its dark, relentless, devastatingly ironic way, The Pledge is an exhilarating movie, partly because it isn't afraid to be genuinely challenging.

Up in smoke, down in flames, reduced to ashes - choose your disaster metaphor for Bonfire of the Vanities. As filmed by Brian De Palma, it's "Misfire of the Vanities," the most wrongly conceived of the many popular novels brought to the screen this year. [21 Dec 1990, p.49]

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]

If you thought ''Moulin Rouge,'' or, for that matter, ''Tommy,'' was trippy, Hedwig, with its glorious convergence of material and performer, will show you what you've been missing.

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]

The Cutting Edge plays like the kind of date movie written by a computer, and not a very smart one...It makes shaved ice look deep. [27 March 1992, p.29]

The film's bountiful warmth and gusto do their work. By the end, we feel part of the family, too.

The film doesn't match the novel's adrenaline level, but is in every other way more stylish and intelligent...Smart, sexy, provocative entertainment. [30 July 1993, p.25]

There's nothing really awful about Angels in the Outfield." But it never becomes more than an efficient, by-the-numbers reworking of the 1951 baseball fantasy about cellar-dwellers turned pennant-winners with a little supernatural help. [15 July 1994, p.41]

She (Bullock) has a way of landing on her feet and remaining simpatico no matter how cheesy the script is. That's what happens here.

Cronenberg hasn't so much filmed Naked Lunch as tamed it, turned it into entertainment, with oozy rubber bugs, big and little, that look left over from David Lynch's movie of "Dune," or the intergalactic dive from "Star Wars." [10 Jan 1992]

There isn't a scene in Cocktail that isn't cheap and dumb, and whether its camp entertainment value compensates for its contempt for women is a question. Cocktail makes beer commercials look deep, makes "Top Gun" look like "Hamlet." [29 Jul 1988, p.21]

There's no getting around the fact that it's an uneven exercise that shows signs of having gestated too long. [04 Jun 1999]

Leviathan may be mediocre, unoriginal, boring and nauseating, but it probably won't be the worst sci-fi we'll see this year. [17 Mar 1989, p.46]

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 most uncomprehending sequel of the last few years. It shows no awareness at all of what made the first film work so surprisingly well. What little emotion it summons is superficial and sentimental. The rest of the time it falls back on dumb farce and embarrassing Brit-bashing, climaxing with a vacuous chase scene. And this in a film that's supposed to be more mature than its predecessor. [21 Nov 1990, p.37]

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.

It begins promisingly.... But the film has no center, succumbs to drift, and gets away from Hackford. [03 Mar 1984]

The action is mostly witless and predictable. One measure of its desperation and lack of respect for its audience is the frequency with which it labors to wring humor from flatulence and excrement gags.