I haven't been exactly a fan of the "Nightmare" series, but I found this movie, with its unsettling questions about the effect of horror on those who create it, strangely intriguing.

Nothing at all is surprising about Next Generation except how enjoyable it is. It won't become a classic, but is quite a hoot, like the cockamamie Motel Hell, as funny as it is frightening. [29 Aug 1997, p.32]

The River Wild is one of the movies you want to play along with, you really do, but it gets so many details subtly wrong that finally you lose patience and turn on it.

This is one of those curious films before which the viewer is struck dumb. To describe it is to question and praise it - at one and the same time. I enjoyed the time I spent with Moretti, much as I might enjoy sitting next to an interesting stranger on an airplane, and hearing about his life.

What Burton has made is a film which celebrates Wood more than it mocks him, and which celebrates, too, the zany spirit of 1950s exploitation films - in which a great title, a has-been star and a lurid ad campaign were enough to get bookings for some of the oddest films ever made.

Timecop, a low-rent "Terminator," is the kind of movie that is best not thought about at all, for that way madness lies.

Tolkin gives us one richly detailed set piece after another, involving luncheons, openings, massages, telephone tag, psychic consultations, sex, heartfelt conversation, and pagan rituals led by a bald-headed woman who sees what others cannot see.

Robert Redford has directed Quiz Show as entertainment, history, and challenge.

I was not bored during A Good Man in Africa. Just uncomfortable, as the characters thrashed about in search of a purpose.

What Happened Was... is in many ways an admirable movie, and Noonan and Sillas do a quiet, thorough job of representing these two people who seem on the edge of being walled up inside their own walls. There are many small moments of perfect observation. But I never really felt they were building to anything, or heading anywhere.

It is goofier than hell - you can't stop watching because nobody in the audience, and possibly nobody on the screen, has any idea what's going to happen next.

Here's a movie filled with drama and excitement, unfolding a plot of brilliant complexity, in which the central character is solemn and silent, saying only what he has to say, revealing himself only strategically.

If the film is perhaps a little slow in its middle passages, maybe that is part of the idea, too, to give us a sense of the leaden passage of time, before the glory of the final redemption.

It must have been even more exhausting to make this film than it is to watch it. But it's made with a kind of manic joy that makes me suspect its writer-director, Roger Roberts Avary, might develop into a considerable filmmaker, once he thinks of something to say.

Like all good satirists, he knows that too much realism will weaken his effect. He lets you know he's making a comedy. There's an over-the-top exuberance to the intricate crosscut editing and to the hyperactive camera.

Color of Night approaches badness from so many directions that one really must admire its imagination. Combining all the worst ingredients of an Agatha Christie whodunit and a sex-crazed slasher film, it ends in a frenzy of recycled thriller elements, with a chase scene, a showdown in an echoing warehouse, and not one but two cliches from Ebert's Little Movie Glossary: The Talking Killer and the Climbing Villain.

It is done well, yet one is still surprised to find it done at all.

Airheads has a giddy time living up to its low expectations.

As in "The Wedding Banquet," Lee shows off a real gift for fleshing out characters with quick, deft strokes. [19 Aug 1994, p.41]

The result is a movie character who seems half real, half animated.

I've seen Barcelona twice. It seemed deeper to me the second time. It appears at first to be about the casual lives of young men trying to launch their careers, but eventually (again, like an Allen movie) it reveals darker depths and meanings.

The movie is not so much about romance as about goodheartedness, which is a rarer quality, and not so selfish. And Cage has a certain gentleness that brings out nice soft smiles on Fonda's face.

North is one of the most unpleasant, contrived, artificial, cloying experiences I’ve had at the movies. To call it manipulative would be inaccurate; it has an ambition to manipulate, but fails.

The setup in The Client is done so well, it deserves a better payoff.

The director, James Cameron, is a master of action (he worked with Schwarzenegger on "Terminator 2"), and when he's doing his thing, no one does it better.

The baseball action isn't very interesting because the angels (led by Christopher Lloyd) manipulate the outcomes. And the human interest stuff is canned and unconvincing.

What a magical movie.

If you respond to film noir, if you like dark streets and women with scarlet lips and big fast cars with running boards, the look of this movie will work some kind of magic. The story itself may not be so mesmerizing, but who really cares? Style and tone are everything with a movie like this, which wants to bring to life a dark secret place in the lurid pulp imagination.

The result is a genuinely fascinating film, one that may tell more about MGM musicals, and aspects of American society, than a film devoted to still more highlights from musical numbers that did make their way into films.

Like Free Willy, The Secret Garden, Searching for Bobby Fischer and The Man in the Moon, this is a "family movie" that doesn't condescend. It takes its 12-year-old hero as seriously as he takes baseball, and nothing is "dumbed down" for the PG audience.

It's a rambling, unfocused biography of Wyatt Earp, starting when he's a kid and following his development from an awkward would-be lawyer into a slick gunslinger. This is a long journey, in a three-hour film that needs better pacing.

The movie never convinced me that much chemistry existed between the cop and the ex-con. And, for that matter, I wasn't much moved by Macaulay Culkin's performance as the smart little waif.

Basically what we have here is a drama, with comedy occasionally lifting the mood. The result is a surprising seriousness; this isn't the mindless romp with cute animals.

We've seen this done before, but seldom so well, or at such a high pitch of energy.

All of these films approach their subjects with such irony that we cannot take them at face value; "White" is the anti-comedy, in between the anti-tragedy and the anti-romance.

City Slickers II, subtitled The Legend of Curly's Gold, makes the mistake of thinking we care more about the gold than about the city slickers. Like too many sequels, it has forgotten what the first film was really about. Slickers II is about the MacGuffin instead of the characters.

Renaissance Man is a labored, unconvincing comedy that seems cobbled together out of the half-understood remnants of its betters.

Fear of a Black Hat, which treats rap with the same droll dubiousness that This is Spinal Tap provided for heavy metal, is not as fearless and sharp-edged as it could be - but it provides a lot of laughs, and barbecues a few sacred cows.

This is a great-looking movie, a triumph of set design and special effects, creating a fantasy world halfway between suburbia and a prehistoric cartoon.

The modern sequences lack realism or credibility. The ancient sequences play like the equivalent of a devout Bible story. The result is a slow-moving and pointless exercise by Bertolucci, whose “The Last Emperor” was a much superior telling of a similar story about a child who is chosen for great things.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is one of the more empty, pointless, baffling films I can remember, and the experience of viewing it is an exercise in nothingness.

The first lighthearted, laugh-oriented family Western in a long time, and one of the nice things about it is, it doesn't feel the need to justify its existence. It acts like it's the most natural thing in the world to be a Western.

Crooklyn is not in any way an angry film. But thinking about the difference between its world and ours can make you angry, and I think that was one of Lee's purposes here.

It is a stunning work of visual style - the best version of a comic book universe I've seen - and Brandon Lee clearly demonstrates in it that he might have become an action star, had he lived.

The chaos in Kika is so brilliantly orchestrated, and so gamely acted, you can't help being drawn into it. There is, truly, never a dull moment. And, in patented Almodovar fashion, the bold, kitschy colors of the costumes and settings, provide their own charm. [27 May 1994, p.43]

Who was this movie made for? Not for me, that's sure, but I have a hunch younger kids will find it satisfying.

As for Madchen Amick, a stunning beauty with an edgy intelligence, Kazan has given her a role that grows more interesting as it deepens.

The screenplay, by Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon, has a good feel for female best-friend relationships, and the dialogue has life and edge to it.

The movie is afraid to be - yes - Politically Incorrect. It isn't really critical of anybody's behavior, and it sketches its campus fringe groups in broad, defanged generalizations. Beneath its facade of contemporary politics, it's another formula film in which the kids want to party and get drunk, and the adults are fuddy-duddies.

Berenger, McNamara and Eleniak perform what was demanded from them within the confines of the flimsy script. The story, though, is painfully short on laughs, never building a foundation for the attachments forged by film's end. [26 Apr 1994, p.30]

Ice-T's streetwise humor saves this from an exercise in silliness. [16 Apr 1994, p.24]

It wants to make Stuart Sutcliffe the focus of the film, and it’s never able to convince us there’s a story there.

I am not sure why this isn't very funny, but it's not.

Red Rock West is a diabolical movie that exists sneakily between a western and a thriller, between a film noir and a black comedy.

For all its absurdity Cronos generates a real moral conviction.

It occurred to me, watching the film, that what Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley do here is not easy, and is done well. It would be fatal to the movie if either one ever betrayed the slightest suggestion that they know funny things are going on. They play everything on a level of seriousness that would be appropriate, say, for a 1960s TV cop drama. Their timing is impeccable. And they provide the sure, strong center around which the madness revolves.

It's very perceptive about the relationships among its characters - how they talk, how they compete, what their values are. And Howard has cast the movie with splendid veteran actors, who are able to convey all the little quirks and idiosyncrasies of real people.

Bitter Moon is wretched excess. But Polanski directs it without compromise or apology, and it's a funny thing how critics may condescend to it, but while they're watching it you could hear a pin drop.

MacLaine and Cage are really very good here.

The movie is that it's all surface and no substance. Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously. Everything is style. The performances seem deliberately angled as satire.

The movie does indeed feature much footage of MacPherson and her sister sirens in the nude, but it is smarter, more thoughtful and more good-tempered than you might expect.

Material like this is only as good as the acting and writing. The Ref is skillful in both areas. Dennis Leary, who has a tendency, like many standup comics, to start shouting and try to make points with overkill, here creates an entertaining character.

Forms a community that eventually envelops us.

Some of the best movies are like this: They show everyday life, carefully observed, and as we grow to know the people in the film, maybe we find out something about ourselves. The fact that Hallstrom is able to combine these qualities with comedy, romance and even melodrama make the movie very rare.

Sugar Hill is a dark, bloody family tragedy, told in terms so sad and poetic that it transcends its genre and becomes eloquent drama. [25 Feb 1994, p.33]

The movie is told almost entirely from Nolte's point of view, and he makes an immensely likable character right from the top.

The performances are all just fine; I wish they'd been at the service of another movie.

Seagal has been quoted as saying he isn't proud of the films he's done, that he wanted to move onto more serious fare. In that light, it's possible to see the wretched excesses of On Deadly Ground as self-punishment. To each his own, but when the audience is punished, we're standing on the wrong ground. [21 Feb 1994, p.25]

A particularly nasty and mean-spirited action picture, with the dramatic depth of an arcade game.

I found the movie a long, unfunny slog through an impenetrable plot. Kids might like it.

If Depardieu seems right at home in My Father the Hero, perhaps that is because only two years ago he made a French film called "Mon Pere, Ce Heros," with exactly the same plot. I saw it, and would say it was more or less exactly as appealing as this English version.

Romeo is Bleeding is an exercise in overwrought style and overwritten melodrama, and proof that a great cast cannot save a film from self-destruction.

Here is a film so placid and filled with sweetness that watching it is like listening to soothing music.

A genuine guilty pleasure. [17 Jan 1994, p.29]

As sheer moviemaking, it is skilled and knowing, and deserves the highest praaise you can give a horror film: It works.

Iron Will is an Identikit plot, put together out of standard pieces. Even the scenery looks generic; there's none of the majesty of Disney's genuinely inspired dog movie, "White Fang."

Perhaps the documentary The War Room will bring a deeper dimension to the profession's image. At the very least, it may dispel the notion that campaign managers pervert the course of democracy with behind-the-scenes omniscience; the surprise in the film is that they're often as confused as their candidates sometimes seem to be.

The movie does a harrowing job of showing how, and why, a man might be made to confess to a bombing he didn't commit.

In its minor-key way, "Ghost" is a clever, intelligent and visually compelling thriller. Its gimmick more than carries its weight. [31 Dec 1993, p.39]

The movie is too pat and practiced to really be convincing, and the progress of Ariel's relationships with the two grumps seems dictated mostly by the needs of the screenplay. But Matthau and Lemmon are fun to see together, if for no other reason than just for the essence of their beings.

As shamelessly as Tombstone rips off pieces of Unforgiven, you can rest assured none of them relate to Eastwood's strong portrayal of women -- or his antipathy toward violence. The latest shootout at the O.K. Corral is only a prelude to your basic bloodletting in the name of mass entertainment. [24 Dec 1993, p.25]

The flashback-laden story, which has the Joker romping through a decrepit old model for the space-age future, is pretty herky-jerky. But what counts most are the visuals, which in true comic book fashion are colorful and wittily stylized: Batman's cinderblock jaw and massive physique can't obscure his lunkhead nature and unimpressive voice. [27 Dec 1993, p.23]

And yet Philadelphia is quite a good film, on its own terms. And for moviegoers with an antipathy to AIDS but an enthusiasm for stars like Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, it may help to broaden understanding of the disease.

Any movie featuring cameos ranging from Lou Reed to Mikhail Gorbachev has its heart in the right place. That heart is what sustains it; though long and uneven, occasionally sentimental and portentous in its message, Faraway, So Close comes close enough to greatness. [23 Dec 1993, p.29]

By casting attractive stars in the leads, by finding the right visual look, by underlining the action with brooding, ominously sad music, a good director can create the illusion of meaning even when nothing's there.

What is most amazing about this film is how completely Spielberg serves his story. The movie is brilliantly acted, written, directed and seen. Individual scenes are masterpieces of art direction, cinematography, special effects, crowd control.

This is a painful movie to watch. But it is also exhilarating, as all good movies are, because we are watching the director and actors venturing beyond any conventional idea of what a modern movie can be about. Here there is no plot, no characters to identify with, no hope.

If Wayne and Garth ever grow confident of their success, the series will be over. Everything depends on the delighted disbelief with which they greet every new victory.

What's strange about Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit is that it abandons most of what people liked about the first movie and replaces it with a formula as old as the hills.

Walter Hill's "Geronimo," a film of great beauty and considerable intelligence, covers the same ground as many other movies about Indians, but in a new way.

Adapted with unusual faithfulness from John Guare's much-heralded 1990 play, the movie, directed by Fred Schepisi with a screenplay by the playwright, is nothing if not frenetic. And yet it attempts to explore a slew of profound ideas -- about race, social class, art and the whole nature of experience among a very particular and unusually sophisticated segment of contemporary urban American society. [22 Dec 1993, p.48]

The Snapper sees its characters with warmth and acceptance, and earns its laughs by being wise about human nature.

Francois Girard’s “Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould” brilliantly breaks with tradition and gives us a movie that actually inspires us to think about what it was like to be this man.

But the film is not as amusing as the premise, and there were long stretches when I'd had quite enough of Mrs. Doubtfire.

This is a movie that surprises you. The setup is such familiar material that you think the story is going to be flat and fast. But the screenplay by John Lee Hancock goes deep. And the direction by Clint Eastwood finds strange, quiet moments of perfect truth in the story.

What is most beguiling about Addams Family Values is the way the relationship between Gomez and Morticia has ripened.

Maybe 7-year-olds will enjoy this PG-rated stuff, but it's not funny. [12 Nov 1993, p.39]

The acting here, by Sean Penn, is a virtuoso tour de force - one of those performances that takes on a life of its own.