John Hartl

There's so much blood, sweat and craziness that you stop laughing with first-time screenwriter Harry Bean's script and begin laughing at it. Long before it reaches the fever pitch of a hysterical finale, you may also find yourself looking at your watch. [12 Jan 1990, p.21]

I.F. Stone, an underground journalist who died in1989, left a rich legacy that is celebrated in a timely new documentary, All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception and the Spirit of I.F. Stone.

Sommers is so busy spinning his camera, crowding the soundtrack with animal noises and piling on the cheesy visual effects that he can't stop for a reflective moment or a character-revealing touch.

Despite all of the personalized Wenders touches, it ultimately resembles many a top-heavy, star-laden, special-effects-driven production from the major-studio assembly lines.

Fails to single out one plot thread and make a claim to it.

A wry, rambling, smart comedy.

Depp, who has never looked so angelic, is covering familiar ground here, playing another Gilbert Grape type who's involved with an older woman. [9 Sept 1994, p.H34]

So campy that it almost plays like a sendup of the series. It is to Alien what "The Bride of Frankenstein" was to other 1930s Frankenstein movies, and it even shares some of the same themes.

(Smith) seems out of his depth in this talky, rambling religious satire.

Entertaining as it often is, Outside Providence feels as if it were a collection of installments from an unusually raunchy television series.

Polanski has created his funniest and possibly his cruelest movie: a thoroughly warped tale of sexual obsession that leaves its quartet of lust-driven characters with nowhere left to hide. [18 Mar 1994, p.D3]

White Fang is one of the best family films around right now. The violence is not too intense, the harshness of the frontier is downplayed without being ignored, and the wildlife footage is reminiscent of the best Disney documentaries. [18 Jan 1991, p.22]

It's wry and stylish and perfectly cast, and only occasionally does it fall into the trap of taking itself as seriously as its characters sometimes do. [05 Oct 1990, p.26]

Norton's performance, which is every bit as varied as his Oscar-nominated work in Primal Fear, once more demonstrates that he's one of the most remarkable chameleons working in film.

The script, attributed to four writers, is based on stories of cats who roamed the Warners back lot, begging for food among the discarded sets of "Casablanca" and "East of Eden." Imagine any storyline designed around that studio legend and you're likely to come up with a more auspicious plot than the one this team has created. [26 Mar 1997]

Greenaway keeps his wits about him. His vision of human evil is as droll as it is unrelenting. Trained as a painter, he can't help making this particular hell look gorgeous. "The Cook, the Thief, etc." is, paradoxically, a beautiful, drily witty film about monstrous vulgarity and ugliness. [6 Apr 1990, p.22]

An oddly overblown, semi-operatic adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.'s once-banned 1964 novel about life among the abused prostitutes, lonely sailors, lonelier drag queens, repressed homosexuals and gay-bashing pimps along the hellish waterfront district of Brooklyn in 1952. [11 May 1990, p.22]

Already nicknamed "This Is Spinal Rap," this clever fake-documentary should delight both those who love rap music and those who feel it's been given a free ride by music critics for far too long. [17 Jun 1994, p.E3]

Neither Spader nor Amick can get past the generic nature of the characters they're playing, nor can they make up for Kazan's timid approach to their supposedly steamy love scenes. The nude Spader is so carefully draped and arranged that he could be posing for a soft-core parody, while Amick resorts to doing an impersonation of a haughty 1940s glamour queen. [6 May 1994, p.D31]

Goes out of its way to suppress most natural dramatic conflict, so it's left to the actors to carry the day.

It's hard to think of a single memorable line from Restaurant, even a memorably bad one.

The best that can be said of this campy but witless time-travel thriller is that it's acted with some authority. [12 Jan 1991, p.C7]

The first-time director and co-writer, John Dahl, has a veteran's assurance. He knows exactly what he wants from the actors, how to stage the tricky action, how to keep the plot comprehensible, how to use the Nevada/Arizona locations to suggest the aridness of the characters' lives. He doesn't break any new ground with Kill Me Again, but he does establish himself as a filmmaker to watch. [04 May 1990, p.3]

The characterizations now seem a tad thin, but Ives still impresses, and so does Charlton Heston as the most conflicted character, caught in the middle of this Cold War allegory about two feuding families and an outsider (Gregory Peck) with pacifist leanings. [29 Feb 1996, p.D3]

The first-time writer-director, Miguel Arteta, does a remarkable job of drawing us into this destructive world and making its rules and rituals seem casual and almost natural. [8 Aug 1997, p.G10]

A very romantic picture.

Warm and fuzzy and amusing enough to be slightly more than an innocuous baby-sitter for the kids.

A movie that keeps you wondering about its characters' true feelings and motives long after you've left the theater.