It goes for broke on high-roller, high-energy scenes, and wins big. [11 Jun 1993, p.41]

Although it's the first time Hank Ketcham's mischievous kid has been brought to the big screen after a few TV versions, the film has the air of a weak, warmed-over sequel. [25 June 1993, p.51]

Last Action Hero is a spectacularly uneven movie. Its action is hectic, but scattershot and mostly pretty empty. On the other hand, it is entertaining in surprising ways. [18 Jun 1993, p.41]

Life with Mikey is awfully easy to take, thanks mostly to Fox's breezy charm. [4 June 1993, p.51]

Sensuous and rarefied, elevating its particulars into epiphanies, The Long Day Closes is as joyful as introversion gets. [9 July 1993, p.25]

The simplicity of Like Water for Chocolate - a Mexican expression for the boiling point - is that of a sophisticated hand paring away all excess until what's left is primal, elemental. In Esquivel's and Arau's fabulist hands, it's the hand that tends the cookfire that rules the world. [19 Mar 1993, p.50]

This time casting Sharon Stone as the victim instead of the predator, it's both sillier and baser than "Basic Instinct," but not as funny, or even as laughable. And it's certainly not sexy. Essentially, it's an industrial object, badly manufactured, filled not with hot stuff, but with the cold dead air of calculation gone wrong. At least no artistry has been wasted on it, although it does squander a provocative theme under its pile of softcore hardware before struggling to its limp ending. [21 May 1993, p.23]

Hot Shots! revels in absurdity. At times it's as surreal as the Marx Brothers. [21 May 1993, p.26]

In both senses of the word, Posse is a colorful outing that fills a real gap, a film you can respect as well as enjoy. [14 May 1993, p.45]

Short, perhaps, on originality but long on savvy and panache, Dave is a feel-good film that's bound to have a lock on the popular vote. [07 May 1993, p.25]

It'll satisfy genre fans and Lee fans and win new adherents to the Asian-style action film, with its dazzling moves that make conventional Hollywood movies look like cement mixers in low gear. [7 May 1993, p.25]

Despite the heavy-handedness of "The Night We Never Met," you feel there's a good New York comedy in Leight's future. "The Night We Never Met," although better than "Slaves of New York," isn't quite it. [30 Apr 1993, p.52]

You'll see worse, but The Dark Half could have been darker. [23 Apr 1993, p.45]

Every now and then, Benny & Joon makes you think it's going to finally take off, but it never does. It looks good but has credibility problems even on the level of whimsical fairy tale. [16 Apr 1993, p.86]

It's not hard to take, but neither does it go anywhere really interesting, nor do the characters much involve us. The curious thing is that it had every reason to register as something more detailed and specific than the flatly generic thing it is. [23 Apr 1993, p.50]

It's lacking in eventfulness and drama, but there's a sweetness in it that places it a cut above most synthetic children's films. As a writer and director, Evans doesn't always know where to go with his material, but at least there's some feeling behind it, and this sometimes rescues it from its becalmed predictability. [7 Apr 1993, p.49]

The big difference between Luc Besson's "La Femme Nikita" and this big, slick remake is that this new film has less visual edge and is more sentimental. It's more upfront with the idea that Maggie, as she's called here, has feelings. Still, Fonda's at her most compelling in the early scenes. [19 March 1993, p.50]

Harris means to give us a realistic look at contemporary African-American women and succeeds impressively. [09 Apr 1993, p.46]

CB4 succeeds on joke overkill, made possible by a story framework that begs for heavy-handed puns and sophomoric sight gags. It is a cotton-candy comedy, far wispier than its prototype, but equally insightful into the rap world as This Is Spinal Tap was to rock. [12 Mar 1993, p.30]

Fire in the Sky, the latest abducted-by-aliens movie, is no Close Encounters. It's hardly any encounter at all. [13 Mar 1993, p.10]

Mad Dog and Glory is the funniest and most original studio comedy since "White Men Can't Jump." What makes it fun is its ability to find new ways to do old things. [5 Mar 1993, p.61]

It's amazingly suspenseless and devoid of substance. [05 Mar 1993]

Appealing as he can be at playing loose cannons, however, Cage can only go so far before being mired in a script that generates stereotypes as quickly as it thinks it's knocking them down. [05 Mar 1993, p.64]

Slickly directed by Joel Schumacher, who sees that each and every button in this unabashedly manipulative film is pushed hard, Falling Down could have been deeply disturbing if it weren't so cartoony, so determined to glibly escape the moral consequences of the vicarious white-rampage fantasies to which it caters. [26 Feb 1993, p.25]

All sword and sorcery movies are parodies, but Sam Raimi's "Army of Darkness" is the best intentional parody that hardware-heavy genre has ever seen, piling conventions from other genres on top of it until the screen seems a multilayered deli delight...Entertaining and ingeniously resourceful, it's a virtuosic comic-strip movie. [19 Feb 1993, p.30]

Tearjerking aside, Untamed Heart reminds us of the bravery it takes to love. That's the ultimate source of its appeal. [12 Feb 1993, p.50]

The reconstituted Vanishing is a pretty banal proposition. [05 Feb 1993, p.27]

Certainly Loaded Weapon delivers laughs. It's just that you notice the spaces between the laughs more readily than with the "Naked Gun" fusillade. I laughed, but I laughed more at Joe Dante's sendup of schlock sci-fi a la William Castle last week in "Matinee." [5 Feb 1993, p.33]