In short, the film panders to teen-agers - but not smartly or stylishly. [07 June 1991, p.48]

Jungle Fever is Spike Lee's best film yet. Although it's about a black man and a white woman launching an intimate relationship, it's anything but an interracial love story. Which is exactly the film's point. [7 June 1991, p.43]

There's enchanting delicacy and irresistible quirkiness in Anthony Minghella's allegory of grief. And humane comedy, too, in this fable about a woman flattened by inconsolable loss, then rejoining the world. [24 May 1991]

The problem with the realization of this concept, Drop Dead Fred, is its lack of subtlety. The filmmakers go too broad. Where there should be whimsy, there is grating farce. The character of Fred is like "Laugh-In" comedian Alan Sues doing Monty Python comedy skits on Billy Idol for "Sesame Street." Whenever he's onscreen, he's picking his nose and slinging food and muttering insults. Early into the movie, he gets on your nerves. [24 May 1991, p.52]

Only the Lonely is an unflashy romantic comedy, one that is mildly romantic and mildly comic - though not enough of either to make it fully satisfying. [24 May 1991, p.48]

Although Truth or Dare makes you wish it had dug more deeply, it nevertheless convinces you that there's more to Madonna than the stage personas she sheds like skins. It's as much an exercise in packaging as in documentary, but at least the package isn't empty. [17 May 1991, p.29]

Stone Cold trips up at the end, but it's still recommended for fans of the genre or Road Warrior fans out for a night of cinematic slumming. It snarls, it bites, it roars. [17 May 1992, p.32]

Brown and Dennehy aren't teen-age, they're not mutants, they're not ninjas, they're not even turtles, but they're just as entertaining the second time around, and of how many sequels can that be said? [10 May 1991, p.30]

It's thoughtful as well as funny, and you never want to take your eyes off Barkin. [10 May 1991, p.27]

As no other Holocaust film quite has, Europa, Europa, with dreamlike clarity, refuses to let us forget that hate works. And that self-hate works even better. [19 July 1991, p.23]

Petrie's directing debut - he had been a scriptwriter - is proficient and assured from the technical standpoint, but he's unable to overcome the essential preposterousness of his screenplay. [26 Apr 1991, p.74]

A Kiss Before Dying is another failed remake, never approaching the claustrophobic pressure of the far grittier and more highly charged 1956 version with Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward and Mary Astor. [26 Apr 1991, p.72]

While visually handsome, Oscar is terminally sluggish. [26 Apr 1991, p.71]

It's a sleeper - the kind of fresh, dark, edgy, formula-shunning surprise that snaps you out of the usual Hollywood-induced torpor and nudges you back into believing in movies. [19 Apr 1991, p.44]

Object of Beauty is another zap-the-yuppies outing, more elegant than most, and sophisticated, too, but hollow and on the whole charmless as it leaves us uninvolved with the spectacle of cash-strapped John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell holed up in a posh London hotel, living on room service and dodging the manager. [19 Apr 1991, p.42]

Poison is at once disturbing and beautiful, a cereus blooming in the darkest of night. Uncompromising and heady with ambition, Haynes likes to make his audiences think. Poison succeeds in this goal, and increases in power the more you look back on it. Like the most potent movies, it creeps on you. [19 Apr 1991, p.41]

The Comfort of Strangers seldom makes sense, and the bizarre behavior often seems arbitrarily trowled on from the outside as opposed to something bubbling up from within. The best that can be said for it is that its maze-like ways at times intriguingly replicate the mazelike streets of Venice [12 Apr 1991, p.82]

Ju Dou is far richer and more jolting than "The Postman Always Rings Twice," which it suggests. When it comes to film noir entrapment, we have nothing on the Chinese. [05 Sep 1990, p.63p]

An inferior, though quite respectable, follow-up. [22 Mar 1991, p.73]

Its squandering of talent makes Class Action a film that deserves to be disbarred, not reviewed. [15 Mar 1991]

Winkler fills the screen with some first-rate actors doing first-rate work. It's a handsomely crafted film as well as an honorable one. But it's also, on the whole, dramatically flat. [15 Mar 1991, p.41]

Along with Cusack's marvelously natural performance, True Colors offers a premise deeper than most twentysomething-audience movies. The ethical conflicts between Spader and Cusack are thought-provoking, if simplistic and exaggerated. At the same time, True Colors seems to scream Cultural Statement. It's self-consciously anthemic. [26 Apr 1991, p.74]

Stone's film rolls off the screen with affection and authority, even when Morrison's life enters its sodden, bummed-out finale, and Val Kilmer does an uncanny job of identifying with Morrison. [01 Mar 1991]

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to Atlantic City, and Dan Aykroyd decided to make an offensively tedious movie about it. [16 Feb 1991, p.14]

The script and direction are her real enemies here. Sleeping with the Enemy is a vehicle with too many manufacturing defects. [08 Feb 1991, p.39p]

With little going for it except its references to part one, The Neverending Story II is a neverending disappointment. [09 Feb 1991, p.11]

Popcorn is a "Phantom of the Shlopera" - the kind of corny B-movie midnight campers can sink their plastic fangs into. [01 Feb 1991, p.21]

It's acceptable Shakespeare - no more arbitrary than most stage productions, especially the willfully anachronistic ones, or the ones with political agendas thrust upon them. [18 Jan 1991]