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]