Loaded with heart, wit, originality, juicy performances and contemporary relevance, Patrice Leconte's Ridicule is one of the most rewarding costume dramas in years. [06 Dec 1996, p.C6]

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]

Hampton's directorial inexperience shows, and the film remains curiously disjointed and devoid of suspense. [06 Dec 1996]

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]

Larger Than Life is a thin, disjointed road comedy that contains a few laughs despite itself. No matter how loosey-goosey and silly the script gets, and no matter how contrived the premise is, Bill Murray manages to sneak in a number of typically zany actions and reactions. [01 Nov 1996, p.E7]

Never quite scary, never funny for long, never enough over-the-top. It's never compelling plotwise, either, especially toward the sloppy ending, when Mantegna is inexplicably erased from the plot. [26 Oct 1996, p.F3]

Jude is a modernized version of Hardy, but a handsome, fluid and red-blooded one that has no difficulty finding correlatives to the prejudice and hatred of wit and spirit against which Hardy, in his gimlet-eyed way, so passionately attacked. [25 Oct 1996]

Shining with freshness and commitment, Get On the Bus is one of the far from overwhelming number of films you owe it to yourself to see in 1996. [16 Oct 1996, p.F1]

Comically rueful, semi-autobiographical, warmly appealing. [25 Oct 1996, p.C8]

Microcosmos is a microspectacular. [08 Nov 1996, p.C6]

It's no surprise that the mountainous, pseudo-mystical actor stuck to his recipe for The Glimmer Man, an inoffensive cop-socky flick. [05 Oct 1996, p.C3]

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]

Nobody does a better job of putting animals and people in the same movie than Carroll Ballard, and he does it again, humanely as ever, in Fly Away Home. [13 Sep 1996, p.D8]

The Trigger Effect is a smarter-than- average thriller that proves David Koepp can direct films as well as write them. [30 Aug 1996, p.F1]

A Very Brady Sequel is a little like the meatloaf prepared by Alice, the Bradys' maid - padded, but palatable. It walks a line between evoking the old TV show and kidding it and it's as surprisingly lively a sequel as the original was for a big-screen treatment of an old TV staple. [23 Aug 1996, p.F4]

Jim McKay's funky, spunky "Girls Town" is a refreshing girls-who-fight-back film that succeeds in being political without ever being didactic. [30 Aug 1996, p.F4]

The Fan isn't a strikeout, but it doesn't exactly knock the cover off the ball, either. It's more like a soft pop fly, taking its time before settling very predictably into a waiting fielder's glove. [16 Aug 1996, p.D3]

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]

It's still a film with genuine laugh-out-loud moments, most provided by comedian Dennis Miller. On first glance it would appear Miller is horribly miscast in this predictable fang flick. But Miller's ceaseless verbal machine gun of one-liners salvages the movie. [16 Aug 1996, p.D3]

At times, the dead space in Escape from L.A. becomes impossible to ignore. But if it never quite becomes the wild ride it sets out to be, it's seldom boring to watch, either. [09 Aug 1996, p.C6]

Flirt has its moments, and Ewell and Nikaidoh are auspicious additions to the Hartley rep company. But Flirt will appeal mostly to Hartley completists. [23 Aug 1996]

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]

Although not without flaws, Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo is, nevertheless, the most ambitious and impressive achievement of Vietnam's young film industry. [01 Nov 1996, p.E5]

Lisa Krueger's "Manny & Lo" is the most original and unexpected family-values film of the year. [09 Aug 1996, p.C8]

It's technically sophisticated and intermittently engaging, and its showdown is more than up to genre standards. But fresh it isn't. [19 July 1996, p.G4]

This is classic Disney in the traditional mold - cute, but also pushing into dark territory, fueled by elemental passions. [21 June 1996, p.47]

Never mind that it doesn't always work or that the film's two halves never quite mesh. The Cable Guy essentially is a genie escaped from a bottle, except that the bottle is a TV screen. [14 June 1996, p.59]

A few of the sequences are bad enough to be funny, especially the ones involving Sheen skulking around alien central in a red jump suit, falling down a lot, as if directed by Ed Wood. [31 May 1996, p.52]

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]

It'll be a test of whether Cruise's star power and De Palma's ability to seduce audiences with visual style can compensate for a fundamental hollowness at the center. Mission: Impossible plays like a project trying to become a movie and not quite making it. [22 May 1996, p.63]

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]

Carrie meets Clueless, with a few good campy moments, some attractive cinematography, and an entertainingly lurid performance by Fairuza Balk, whose mascara, lipstick and spikey dog collar give the movie a decidedly Vicious (Sid, that is) twist. [03 May 1996, p.52]

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]

The script is a little too clunky to serve Ricki Lake well, and Richard Benjamin's direction is a bit too sluggish to disguise her limited range as he crams this romantic fairy tale a little too forcefully into its predetermined mold. [19 Apr 1996, p.53]

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]

Brain Candy may be too safe a venture for the Kids in the Hall, but it still has more oddball charm than most Lorne Michaels-produced comedy on the big screen. [12 Apr 1996, p.68]

This sounds like a fairly standard debut. But Wong smothers the story with tremendous style. Some directors give you a healthy ratio of mashed potatoes to gravy. Wong seems not at all to care for the potatoes.

Fear is a formulaic thriller that is like "Cape Fear" meets "Fatal Attraction," or "Splendor in the Grass" on crack, but without a hint of those movies' psychological complexities and camp moments. [12 Apr 1996]

It's a splendidly designed flight of imagination that soars from the barren grays of England to the Art Deco towers of New York over a shining sea of wrinkled, deep blue velvet. With the movie's mixture of stop-motion animation, digital animation and live action, Roald Dahl's 1961 children's book has found its ideal realization. [12 Apr 1996, p.59]

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]

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]

The enormously appealing Randle holds the screen even when the thinness of Suzan-Lori Parks' script becomes inescapably apparent. There isn't much vigorous narrative pulse, complexity or even faceting of Randle's character, and the arbitrary ending seems both forced and inconclusive. [22 Mar 1996, p.53]

In short, Almodovar opens some new doors to his artists here, and they respond in surprising, captivating ways. [29 Mar 1996]

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]

Kinetic, fizzy, delivering more bounce to the ounce than anything out there right now, "Rumble in the Bronx" is my kind of mindless fun. [23 Feb 1996]

Miss Piggy may not be Babe, but she sure packs a good oink. Her garish performance in the last third of "Muppet Treasure Island" is one of the highlights of this pleasant, cuddly addition to the world of Muppet fantasy. [16 Feb 1996, p.55]

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

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]

If there is potential in a film that ridicules the John Singleton-styled black-men-are-doomed movies like Poetic Justice, Jungle Fever and Straight Out of Brooklyn, Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood squanders it on a series of repetitive gags and sexist jokes. [13 Jan 1996, p.28]

This smart Richard III looks terrific, moves like the wind and rides the nerve of McKellen daring us not to enjoy its central monster's evil panache. [19 Jan 1995, p.57]

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]

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

It's huge, brilliant, dark and cathartic, with a towering and complex performance by Anthony Hopkins that humanizes Nixon more than Nixon ever was able to humanize himself. [20 Dec 1995, p.33]

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]

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

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]

The film is a marvelous visual and emotional record. Alas, at 2 1/2 hours, the shallow stories of "I Am Cuba" become trying and redundant. [01 Dec 1995, p.52]

What makes Toy Story such a dazzling surprise is that while technological novelty is partly what it's about, it transcends technology. [22 Nov 1995, p.29]

The buzz was that Fair Game reshot its ending. They should have reshot its painfully fabricated beginning and middle, too. [03 Nov 1995]

Vampire in Brooklyn isn't a disaster. In fact, it has some funny moments. But it's a long way from being the comeback movie Eddie Murphy needs. [27 Oct 1995, p.57]

Slick and outrageous and subversively funny, Doom Generation is the kind of date movie that will tell you perhaps more than you want to know about your date. [03 Nov 1995, p.46]

Sweet, but slight. [20 Oct 1995, p.52]

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]

For a movie that's supposed to be sex-driven, Jade has the sexual energy of a dead battery. [13 Oct 1995, p.42]

Unstrung Heroes, with its small, detailed brush strokes and its eye for specifics, marks Diane Keaton's directorial breakthrough. [15 Sep 1995]

Tone is everything here, and the film never loses the smiling poise and benevolence that help you buy its gauzy plot as the three sashay through it. Douglas Carter Beane's script is witty as well as buoyant, which is a big help. [08 Sep 1995, p.99]

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 Baby-Sitters Club is far from an unalloyed success, but it offers more pluses than minuses and is both gentle and instructive. [18 Aug 1995, p.50]

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]

Virtuosity doesn't really compute, but there's going to be more of its kind of cyberaction, not less. [4 Aug 1995, pg. 51]

Reichardt's satire is directed just as devastatingly at present-day mindlessness and its inability to reinvent pop myth as against the cliches people inhabit as a substitute for living. And yet there's an affection for the cultural and spiritual meltdown her film's world embraces. River of Grass is incisive and funny. What's even rarer, it's simultaneously subversive and compassionate. Reichardt is a filmmaker to watch. [15 Dec 1995, p.70]

Something to Talk About is one of the summer's very few adult movies, and while it's flawed and meanders into slackness, it also offers kinds of rewards few studio movies do. [4 Aug 1995, p.49]

Living in Oblivion needs more shoot-the-works outrageousness. But even if it thins out, it has an engaging spirit, bright energies and a wry feel for the clashing agendas on the set filled with edgy, starry-eyed pit bulls trying to convince themselves that what they're doing is a career move. [21 July 1995, p.46]

A humane alternative that makes the phrase family values mean something. [14 July 1995, p.33]

Grant is surrounded by terrific comic performances from Robin Williams, Tom Arnold and Jeff Goldblum. Director Chris Columbus bolsters them with lively, robust pacing, turning Nine Months into a comedy of pregnancy that tests positive. [12 July 1995, p.41]

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]

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]

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

The techno-wizards at Industrial Light & Magic really knock themselves out here, but Casper is more serviceable than magical. [26 May 1995, p.85]

To call Johnny Mnemonic a disaster would be giving it too much credit. Disasters land loudly, resoundingly. This one lands with a dull thud. [26 May 1995, p.87]

With its beautifully crafted starburst of colors and themes spanning its requisite Victorian gravity, A Little Princess is a beguiling little supernova of a movie I can't imagine anyone not loving. [19 May 1995, p.64]

Except for a few coups de style, Amateur is a screenful of cool nothingness. [05 May 1995]

A rich mood piece, a study in bleakness, spiritual exhaustion and death. [02 June 1995, p.56]

Wild Reeds is not only Andre Techine's best film in a decade, it's one of France's, too. [22 Sep 1995, p.57]

French Kiss is a French miss. It's got the settings, but it has little magic, less charm and almost no chemistry between Meg Ryan's heartsick American innocent and Kevin Kline's shady Frenchman. [5 May 1995, p.57]

Soderbergh's sleekly malignant Underneath is a nasty little winner. [28 April 1995, p.81]

Village of the Damned has everything you want in a horror movie but the horror. [28 Apr 1995, p.90]

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 not boring to watch, but in the end it's too lame and too tame. [21 Apr 1995]

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]

With keen-edged direction by Barbet Schroeder and a Richard Price screenplay loaded with venomous savvy, Kiss of Death is the most high-powered and brutal New York gangster movie since "GoodFellas." [21 Apr 1995, p.41]

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]

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 more of a throwback to one of the first SNL movie spinoffs, Steve Martin's "The Jerk." It's loaded with physical comedy and enlists Farley's SNL foil, David Spade, to serve as Abbott to Farley's Costello. Farley plays the blimp on uppers, Spade plays the pinched little know-it-all nerd with a chip - a computer chip, probably - on his shoulder. What mostly keeps it going is the sheer gusto with which Farley throws himself into the clowning. It's passably entertaining if you don't think about it too much - and to see it is to realize that it works mightily at getting you to not think too much. [31 March 1995, p.59]

Lori Petty gives her enough scrappiness on screen to make her a lot of fun to watch. When Tank Girl isn't playing like "Road Warrior" meets "La Femme Nikita," it plays like "The Crow" meets "The Brady Bunch," and it's the ultimate spring-break movie. [31 March 1995, p.57]

Basically what we've got here is talent spending itself on something tired, pointless and unrewarding. [24 March 1995, p.60]

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 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]