Dunston Checks In checks in somewhere between cute and zany. It's never really funny, but director Ken Kwapis has a low flair for slapstick that occasionally ignites a spark or two.

But if the idea of tiny, little Sally Field in the Charles Bronson part strikes you as a bit silly, that's only the beginning of the idiocies. [12 Jan 1996]

It's hardly great, but it's completely mesmerizing. [02 Feb 1996]

Imagine "The Godfather" through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy just in from the hinterlands of rural Jersey and his dad's pepper farm, and you have an idea of the originality, and the oddity, of the film. [16 Feb 1996]

It's that rarest of all films, the one that can unify, not divide, the generations, as both jaded teen-agers and their more innocent parents can connect with it. And of course for the kids, it's pure balm from heaven.

Now and Then tells twin stories. One is a delight. One is a disastrous distraction. [20 Oct 1995]

Friedkin still has it: The car chase is the best thing in the movie, though so unconnected to the plot it could have been added without changing Eszterhas' script a whit. But, that excitement over, the movie ultimately self-destructs in the matter of its own ending. [13 Oct 1995]

Dense, ironic and thoroughly engrossing caper melodrama.

Yet what is most impressive about the movie are the odd notes of grace it provides its ostensible villains. [4 Aug 1995]

It's exciting and satisfying, even if the chief villain isn't terribly original and the chase scenes are overlong. Bullock is plucky and believable as an average person who must marshal her strength and smarts to get her life back.

At one point, Liotta's character complains that he has ended up "in an episode of 'McHale's Navy.' " That's not too far off. If a sitcom is all you really want out of Operation Dumbo Drop, by all means, put on a parachute and jump. [28 Jul 1995]

The movie felt slow and didactic; it lacked the kind of forward thrust that a narrative mechanic such as Spielberg would have engineered.

First Knight is sublime summer entertainment, from the passion and beauty and grace of its stars to the thrust of its drama to the awe of its spectacle. [07 Jul 1995]

Frequently fascinating, it never builds into anything profound.

Fluke tries hard to snuggle its way into the audience's heart but lacks the warmth and spirit to pull off the feat. [02 Jun 1995]

The gleefully campy moments will earn Johnny Mnemonic cult status. Part of the movie's problem, though, is that it can't decide if it's a cautionary tale or a satire, and it falls apart when it tries to do both. [27 May 1995]

His film would benefit from more subtlety and tighter editing, but as both director and star, Gibson takes the story by the hilt and plunges forward, as single-minded as Wallace screaming into battle.

You feel yourself sinking deeper and deeper into a whole universe that's been put together with almost anthropological intricacy and feels convincing to its tiniest detail. [20 Apr 1995]

Smith and Lawrence have great comic energy and for at least half an hour are sublimely enjoyable -- until the movie's spirit of bloated gargantuanism takes over. [7 April 1995, p.5]

A Goofy Movie is filled with rock sequences that aren't hard enough to please real teen-agers but are too hard to attract any grown-ups. The music sounds like it was composed by Marie Osmond on PCP. [07 Apr 1995]

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh is a just-better-than-routine horror sequel that watches in chilly admiration as some sort of apparition steps out of mirrors and performs atrocities on the unwary. [17 Mar 1995]

Outbreak is fast on its feet and simple in its head.

It's a fine, fierce and nearly unforgettable movie.

As comedies go, the unfunny Heavyweights sinks like a stone. [17 Feb 1995]

Derived from a novel by former Miami Herald reporter John Katzenbach, it might be described as an inversion of the treasured '50s genre known as the Crusading Liberal Movie, as pioneered by, say, Stanley Kramer. But Just Cause doesn't just invert it, it turns it inside out, on its head, upside down and backward, then kicks it in the tail. [17 Feb 1995]

Ladybird, Ladybird is full of powerful, disturbing imagery. It offers a portrait of a woman victimized by a powerful and unfeeling bureaucracy, one that will literally rip a newborn out of the arms of its parents. But it's not didactic. [10 Feb 1995]

Ready to Wear, though it boasts a few small delights, is unready to see.

Beautifully mounted and shot, Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book still feels somewhat callow. Its title aside, it never really deals with the issues that the great Kipling raised continually in his distinguished body of work.