Just when you thought gangster movies had peaked, here's Warren Beatty in Bugsy, a film so suave, outrageous, flamboyant, knowing and above all playful that you're liable to overlook the fact that it's more loaded with American resonances than any three pop culture courses you could sign up for. [20 Dec 1991, p.53]

While The Last Boy Scout covers no new ground, and while it features one of the heftier plot missteps in recent junk-movie history, it's far from the worst of shoot-'em-ups to burst onscreen lately. [13 Dec 1991, p.55]

Although his (Jarmusch) films have moments of sly obliqueness, they leave us feeling stranded in underdevelopment. This is the case with Night on Earth, which is launched on a promising conceit - nocturnal taxi rides in five cities around the world during the same time slot. By the time the film ends, we can't help wondering just who has been taken for a ride. [15 May 1992, p.85]

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]

"Star Trek VI" is one of the weaker additions to the Enterprise enterprise. It merely goes through the motions, including requisite moments that feel obligatory and uninspired. There's nothing gravely wrong here - no embarrassing scenes or egregious plot gaffes. There's simply nothing new, and certainly nothing fresh or reinvented. [6 Dec. 1991, p.53]

My Girl is a pleasant surprise. It's sweet, offbeat and ultimately slight, but likable nevertheless for the emotional integrity it maintains in its story of a girl coming to terms with the death of someone close to her. It's one of the few American movies that tries to be honest about death and give kids credit for being able to cope with it, and that alone makes it recommendable. [27 Nov 1991, p.23]

It's an instant classic, in every way the equal of the great Disney animations of the past. [22 Nov 1991, p.33]

Ultimately, the film's self-censoring will to sweetness and innocence is even more fatal than the flimsiness of the plot. [22 Nov 1991, p.33]

Despite its good looks and expertly turned performances, it trivializes Kafka and his work. The simplistic optimism behind it is more terrifying than anything we actually see on screen. Sitting through Kafka is like watching somebody staff a suicide hotline by telling callers to just lighten up. [21 Feb. 1992, p.28]

The dullest and shoddiest action-adventure flick of the year, with only a few cute Sean Connery moments to rescue it from total, sheer and utter bogosity. [01 Nov 1991, p.29]

Nobody makes films as sympathetic to struggling working-class types as Mike Leigh, and nobody makes them as uncondescendingly. Although uneven, Leigh's latest, Life Is Sweet, is a honey of a film, one of the few to feel good about in this dismal year. [22 Nov. 1991, p.35]

Cool as Ice ends up seeming tired as well as twisted. The man whom promoters call the rap-era Elvis has negative charisma. [19 Oct 1991, p.11]

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

At times Mantegna's character seems little more than his dilemma, but Mamet's stylized dialogue crackles urgently and colorfully, each word landing with a weight you find only in good writing. The dislocation accelerates compellingly into ironic absurdity as Mamet lets his cop swing in the wind in this mordant parable of wrong things done for right reasons. There have been a lot of cop movies, but never one like Homicide. It has a way all its own of raising your consciousness by whacking you in the head. [18 Oct 1991, p.33]

If you like your revenge slow and cliched, you may like Ricochet. The plot, which by now may be too stock even for TV police dramas, is about an escaped convict bent on torturing the cop who put him behind bars. [05 Oct 1991, p.10]

At times, there's no escaping the schematic nature of what's unfolding - such as the buddies' horseplay, and an ending that seems tacked on. But Savoca makes it all happen with a charm that overcomes the lapses in the script. [04 Oct 1991, p.44]

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]

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]

It's got flaws, but, more important, it's keenly felt and it boils off the screen with urgency. [13 Dec 1991, p.66]

Cross Fame and Spinal Tap, color it Irish, and you've got The Commitments, the summer's most irresistible movie. [30 Aug 1991, p.79]

This take, like so many Hollywood takes on French comic originals, is diligent, but, with too few exceptions, irredeemably soggy. [09 Aug 1991, p.42]

Despite the fact that Doc Hollywood isn't exactly brimful of surprises, it's awfully easy to take because it seems a throwback to the kind of formula movies studios used to grind out by the bushel in the '30s and '40s, relying on a squad of accomplished secondary and character roles to flesh them out agreeably. [02 Aug 1991, p.41]

With unpatronizing empathy, Paris Is Burning beckons us into a subculture. [09 Aug 1991, p.39]

Hartley's spare dialogue cuts right to the characters' psyches; his terse, laconic style accentuates the everyday horror. [20 Sept 1991]

When the action sequences move into the sky-diving stuff, they give you a real rush.... Otherwise, though, Point Break is all wet. Too bad, because you always get the sense in a Kathryn Bigelow outing ("Near Dark," "Blue Steel") that she's trying to push a genre into new places. [12 July 1991, p.54]

Nichols is a director who cleanly sculpts his scenes, leaving no intention or action vague. Maybe he should have allowed for a little more ambiguity. [10 July 1991, p.51]

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]

My only complaint about Naked Gun 2 1/2 is that it doesn't give you enough time to finish laughing at one gag before the next one comes along, cracking you up all over again. Naked Gun 2 1/2 is high-flying low comedy, 90 minutes of sublime nonsense that only the devoutly humorless could hate. [28 June 1991, p.69]