A decent futuristic action picture with some great sets, some intriguing ideas, and a few images that will stay with me.

This stuff is so concocted I had no business caring about it. But I did, because of Bullock.

As a family movie, Operation Dumbo Drop is sort of entertaining. As history, it's shameless.

A smart and funny movie, and the characters are in on the joke.

The movie unleashes all sorts of considerations it doesn’t really deal with, and the material edges closer to horror than it probably intends.

I mention all of these tiny logical quibbles because I was amused by them. I was also amused by the film. It isn't as good as the original "Under Siege," but it moves quickly, has great stunts and special effects, and is a lot of fun.

Here, the charm doesn't happen because the movie doesn't care about them as people. They have little human dimension; they are the tools of the plot, and it's unfair to ask actors to supply qualities that the screenplay doesn't account for.

I can imagine a film in which a creature like Sil struggles with her dual nature, and tries to find self-knowledge. Like Frankenstein's monster, she would be an object of pity. But that would be way too subtle for Species, which just adds a slick front end to the basic horror vocabulary of things jumping out from behind stuff.

The movie is entertaining enough in its own way, and Sean Connery makes a splendid King Arthur, but compared with the earlier films this one seems thin and unconvincing.

Ron Howard's film of this mission is directed with a single-mindedness and attention to detail that makes it riveting.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie is about as close as you can get to absolute nothing and still have a product to project on the screen.

The film looks great, the songs are wonderfully visualized, and the characters are appealing.

Maybe the environment is poisoned, and the group is phony, and Carol is gnawing away at her own psychic health. Now there's a fine mess.

There is no rhythm to the movie, no ebb and flow; it's all flat-out spectacle.

The beauty of the film is in its quietness.

A beguiling film about words, secrets and tobacco.

The result is not a movie that is very good, exactly, but it's entertaining and funny.

It's a showcase leading role for Parker Posey, who obviously has the stuff, and generates wacky charm. But the movie never pulls itself together.

It is easy to analyze the mechanism, but more difficult to explain why this film is so deeply moving.

Less lighthearted than one would expect from a film that stars a dog, "Fluke" works on the "aw, how cute" level but fails when it waxes poetic about the way humans don't realize their failures until they experience the animal's point of view. [02 Jun 1995, p.31]

Like The Flintstones and The Addams Family, Casper is an attempt to bring cartoons to life while incorporating them with real actors and sets. As a technical achievement, it's impressive, and entertaining.

Johnny Mnemonic is one of the great goofy gestures of recent cinema, a movie that doesn't deserve one nanosecond of serious analysis but has a kind of idiotic grandeur that makes you almost forgive it.

An action epic with the spirit of the Hollywood swordplay classics and the grungy ferocity of "The Road Warrior."

Cuaron's version of magic realism consists of seeing incredibly fanciful sets and situations in precise detail, and Johnson has provided him with the freedom and logistical support to create such places as the street where Miss Minchin's school looms so impressively.

Die Hard With a Vengeance is basically a wind-up action toy, cleverly made, and delivered with high energy. It delivers just what it advertises, with a vengeance.

I found the idea of the plot more interesting than the plot itself, and am finding the movie more fun to write about than to see.

It seemed to me that the movie had raised too many serious issues to turn into a visual exercise at the end. It's a set piece when a dramatic scene is needed.

Oddly enough, Crimson Tide develops into an actors' picture, not just an action movie. There are a lot of special effects, high-tech gadgets and violent standoffs, yes, but the movie is really a battle between two wills.

Some of the political undertones may go astray, but the emotional center of the film is touching and honest.

Kline's Frenchman is somehow not worldly enough, and Ryan's heroine never convinces us she ever loved her fiance in the first place. A movie about this kind of material either should be about people who feel true passion or should commit itself as a comedy. Compromise is pointless.

One of the most remarkable and haunting documentaries ever made.

By the end of the film the 1949 film noir sources are plainly in view, but earlier, Soderbergh seems more interested in personality quirks than double-crosses, and those are the more interesting scenes.

It's a feel-good film, warm and good-hearted, and as it was heading for its happy ending, I was still a little astonished how much I was enjoying it.

The movie is unconvincing. At the end, Jim is seen going in through a "stage door," and then we hear him telling the story of his descent and recovery. We can't tell if this is supposed to be genuine testimony or a performance. That's the problem with the whole movie.

Swimming With Sharks was written and directed by George Huang, who was himself a personal assistant in Hollywood, and whose networking must have paid off, since he got a movie out of it. His plot may be overwritten and the ending may be less than satisfying, but his eye and ear are right.

There is plot and more plot in Kiss of Death. By the time it's over you may wish you had taken notes, to keep track of who is doing what, and with which, and to whom.

A genuine surprise: A movie as funny as the "SNL" stuff, and yet with convincing characters, a compelling story and a sunny, sweet sincerity shining down on the humor.

Whom do they make these movies for? What exercise in self-deception inspires them to go to such effort and expense for what is obviously going to be a lame exercise in retreadmanship?

Brando doesn't so much walk through this movie as coast, in a gassy, self-indulgent performance no one else could have gotten away with.

This is a splendid, rousing historical adventure, an example of what can happen when the best direction, acting, writing and technical credits are brought to bear on what might look like shopworn material.

Ninjas triumph over anything -- except stupid cliches. [18 Apr 1995, p.24]

I realized the human potential movement has gotten completely out of hand when I heard Goofy telling Max they needed to spend more "quality time" together.

The movie tells no clear story and has no clear ideas.

The movie is an assembly of clichés and obligatory scenes from dozens of other movies, all are better. It has only one original idea, and that's a bad one: The inspiration of making the hero's sidekick into, simultaneously, his buddy, his critic and his rival.

Whatever the faults of Tank Girl, lack of ambition is not one of them.

It's sometimes distracting to tell a story in flashbacks and memories; the story line gets sidetracked. The director, Taylor Hackford, is successful, however, in making the present seem to flow into and out of the past.

Payne is played in the movie by Damon Wayans, in the best work he's done since the inspired "In Living Color" TV series.

Exotica is a movie labyrinth, winding seductively into the darkest secrets of a group of people who should have no connection with one another, but do.

The movie doesn't develop, alas, with the patience and restraint of the earlier film.

Circle of Friends is heartwarming and poignant, a love story that glows with intelligence and feeling.

And the casting of minor characters (including Muriel's sister with the naughty-naughty smirk) is flawless.

The thriller occupies the same territory as countless science fiction movies about deadly invasions and high-tech conspiracies, but has been made with intelligence and an appealing human dimension.

The director's key achievement is creating a convincing sense of daily life in the household and neighborhood. This is not a narrow drama that focuses on a few themes; it paints a whole style of life, the good times with the bad.

The film establishes a bland, reassuring, comforting Brady reality - a certain muted tone that works just fine but needs, I think, a bleaker contrast from outside to fully exploit the humor.

This chance to warm the hearts of put-upon overweight kids ends up saying next to nothing, and that's a big, fat shame.[18 Feb 1995, p.21]

When the movie's over, you realize that the first hour only seemed convincing: The whole movie is made out of thin air.

As preposterous as the plot was, there was never a line of Hackman dialogue that didn't sound as if he believed it. The same can't be said, alas, for Sharon Stone, who apparently believed that if she played her character as silent, still, impassive and mysterious, we would find that interesting. More swagger might have helped.

All of the materials are in place for a film that might have pleased Orwell. But somehow they never come together.

This movie is not a collection of parts from other films. It's an original, and what it does best is show how strangers can become friends, and friends can become like family.

One wonders how In the Mouth of Madness might have turned out if the script had contained even a little more wit and ambition.

John Sayles and Haskell Wexler, who has photographed this movie with great beauty and precision, have ennobled the material.

Before Sunrise is so much like real life - like a documentary with an invisible camera - that I found myself remembering real conversations I had experienced with more or less the same words.

As dopey as some of the flashbacks to MacLeod's early days are, they feature some spectacular shots of Scotland. It's best to just gawk at the visuals rather than concentrate on the story, however. The plot barely exists. [29 Jan 1995, p.58]

It's pretty good, in fact, with full-blooded performances and heartfelt melodrama.

The story, written by Benton from the novel by Richard Russo, unfolds according to its own logic. It has the patience to listen to silences. Above all, it benefits from the confidence of Newman's performance. He is not hammering the points home, not marching from one big scene to another, but simply living on the screen.

But in the absence of prime-time thrills, and more than a snip or two of the TV series' cutting wit, 95 minutes is a long time to stretch this simple-minded stuff. [13 Jan 1995, p.33]

Ladybird, Ladybird...could have been a predictable tear-jerking docudrama, but is too honest to stack the deck.

Singleton's film is interesting for a lot of reasons, but especially because he stands outside this campus system and looks at it with a detached eye.

The Madness of King George tells the story of the disintegration of a fond and foolish old man, who rules England, yet cannot find his way through the tangle of his own mind. I am not sure anyone but Nigel Hawthorne could have brought such qualities to this role.

The result is a little like a comedy crossed with a home movie. It is also, like many home movies, somewhat rambling, and overly dependent on knowing the names of all the players.

I.Q. is a romantic comedy with its heart in the right place, and all of the other pieces distributed correctly, too.

The special effects are convincing, the performances are forthright, and the direction, by Stephen Sommers, recalls his energetic, lighthearted The Adventures of Huck Finn.

Death and the Maiden is all about acting. In other hands, even given the same director, this might have been a dreary slog.

Despite its predictable philosophy, however, Nell is an effective film, and a moving one. That is largely because of the strange beauty of Jodie Foster's performance as Nell, and the warmth of the performance by Liam Neeson, as a doctor who finds himself somehow responsible for her.

To its credit, Street Fighter does have a sense of humor about itself. [26 Dec 1994, p.25]

The movie operates at the level of a literate sitcom, in which the dialogue is smart and the characters are original, but the outcome and most of the stops along the way are preordained.

Maybe there's too much talent. Every character shines with such dazzling intensity and such inexhaustible comic invention that the movie becomes tiresome, like too many clowns.

Director Gillian Armstrong finds the serious themes and refuses to simplify the story into a "family" formula. "

What's sort of wonderful is the way this movie takes that old formula and makes it fresh and new, with actors who give it wit and charm.

The plot is lame, but that doesn't matter, because Dumb and Dumber is essentially pitched at the level of an "Airplane!"-style movie, with rapid-fire sight gags.

Disclosure contains an inspiring terrific shot of Demi Moore's cleavage in a Wonderbra, surrounded by 125 minutes of pure goofiness leading up to, and resulting from, this moment.

Ty Cobb was by many accounts a mean-tempered, vicious, drunken, wife- beating, racist SOB who was impossible to spend any length of time with, and the movie Cobb faithfully represents those qualities, especially the last one.

It should be preserved by the Library of Congress, as an example of creative desperation. It plays like a documentary about a group of actors forced to perform in a screenplay that contains not one single laugh, or moment of wit, or flash of intelligence, or reason for being.

The great achievement of Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is that it allows us to empathize with Dorothy Parker on her long descent.

This is the kind of film that makes you feel intensely alive while you're watching it, and sends you out into the streets afterwards eager to talk deeply and urgently, to the person you are with. Whoever that happens to be.

A lot of actors can hold big machineguns and stand convincingly in front of special effects and explosions. Not many can stand in front of a camera and be nine months pregnant, and actually make us care.

Besson has a natural gift for plunging into drama with a charged-up visual style.

Here is a movie so concerned with in-jokes and updates for Trekkers that it can barely tear itself away long enough to tell a story. From the weight and attention given to the transfer of command on the Starship Enterprise, you'd think a millennium was ending - which is, by the end of the film, how it feels.

The movie isn't in the same league as Disney's big four, and it doesn't have the same crossover appeal to adults, but as family entertainment it's bright and cheerful, and it has its moments.

What makes Jackson's film enthralling and frightening is the way it shows these two unhappy girls, creating an alternative world so safe and attractive they thought it was worth killing for.

A stronger plot engine might have drawn us more quickly to the end, but on a scene by scene basis, Interview with the Vampire is a skillful exercise in macabre imagination.

The Santa Clause (so named after the clause on Santa's calling card that requires Scott to take over the job) is often a clever and amusing movie, and there's a lot of fresh invention in it.

The material never really takes hold. It seems awkward. It lacks fire and passion. Watching it was like having a pale memory of a vivid experience.

I admired the scenes with De Niro so much I'm tempted to give Mary Shelley's Frankenstein a favorable verdict. But it's a near miss. The Creature is on target, but the rest of the film is so frantic, so manic, it doesn't pause to be sure its effects are registered.

Stargate is like a film school exercise. Assignment: Conceive of the weirdest plot you can think of, and reduce it as quickly as possible to action movie cliches.

A movie that is not only ingenious and entertaining, but liberating, because we can sense the story isn't going to be twisted into conformity with some stupid formula.

Sleepless in Seattle and Only You and now Love Affair, all movies about nice people getting into goofy misunderstandings because they love one another so much.You have to be in the right mood to enjoy movies like this. Or maybe they put you in the mood.

Within the limitations of his bare-bones production, Smith shows great invention, a natural feel for human comedy, and a knack for writing weird, sometimes brilliant, dialogue.